Well, that is reassuring. Like Wdupre, I am considering going through Bestbuy here in my town. I see a couple of advantages: 1: No S&H and I get it now 2: there are techs present who, extended warranty or not, I can look at face to face and 3: They probably won't load a bunch of garbage on the system eating up precious RAM and hard space like Gateway did. My last system arrived with almost a gig of unrequested garbage like special browsers for the Disney website, a buch of AOL crap and useless utilities that I could only partially (with my limited skills) remove from the machine. Thanks to you all Scarab