Acadia,

Sorry to hear about your misfortune with Dell (OK, your nightmare with Dell).  It's been my experience that as long as your happy with the generic, out of the box, standard config PC, then Dell, Gateway, etc. are typically OK (used to be the CIO for county government, bought, and fixed many PC's). Unfortunately, your timing was bad in the coorporate sense - Dell no doubt has some licensing argreement with M$ to not let anymore XP licenses "out the door", and the date or your re-shipment confused the heck out of the less than intelligent support staff.

Unfortunately, many of the support staff at the large PC companies probably know less about PC's than you do, they simply follow instructions on their screens, and can't deviate from them (literally, they have no clue what they are doing, and can't do anything that isn't on their "cue card"). At home, except for laptops, I have built my own computers, or got customized systems from small custom PC makers for the last 10 years. I have the advantage of being able to be my own tech support, but they really are much better computers than the out of the box variety.  I always run through the cost analysis, and sometimes the small custom computer builders can beat the price of buying it all myself. I think you'll be much happier with the machine you get from your local computer store.

But, do beware of the local "techno nerd" type of shop that builds for techno nerds, and not the general public. Typically you'll get a great performer that needs constant tweaking to run properly.  As I recall, you had an AMD based unit several years ago that was a nightmare - that's the type of system to watch out for.  AMD's are solid now, and have been for many years. But many small shops put out some really unstable systems several years ago. In the right techno geek hands they worked quite well, for anybody else they were a disaster.

Hope your new system is trouble free, and gives you many many many loooong hours of trouble free use.  Nothing can be as frustrating as not getting what was promised, having a glichy computer, and dealing with brain dead tech support (something that the companies that purchase several Dell's, Gateway's, etc. don't typically have to deal with)!

Good Luck - better days are ahead!

DR

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