| |
|
Found a nice, cheap, dual-core Athlon 64 HP Pavilion desktop through a well-respected online retailer, with a nice enough complement of bells and whistles: good sized hard disc, 1GB ram, pretty good GFX card, and it's even Windows XP so it won't a) antagonise me with Vista and b) I can install Linux losing too much space on the XP partition, which I'll keep for those very rare occasions when I feel like using it.
Having agonised for a while about spending a reasonable sum on the computer, I go ahead and order it. This company is pretty good - if they have an item in stock, it usually arrives next day, even with basic postage costs. Nice: the machine arrives yesterday; unpacked, plugged in, all seems pretty good so far. The Linux DVD ISOs I've been torrenting haven't fully downloaded yet, so I tap toes, twiddle thumbs and get on with more important things while I wait for a seemingly endless download to complete before needing to do anything to radical on the new PC to put Linux on board. Shame Windows XP still seems a bit slow, but I don't intend using it much after all.
So what can this little beast do? I don't have that much in the way of Windows software to test its capabilities, so while that Linux DVD continues to stutter on to the old machine's HD, I install Far Cry to test the GFX card. Result - yeah, nice and smooth demo at high resolution, looks very good. Cool. How about Quake 4? That should push the processor as well as the GFX card a bit. Hmmm, the automatically selected options don't seem that high, except the video settings. Strange, let's see how it runs - and the answer is really slow. Odd - this is supposed to be a machine at least twice as powerful as my old Athlon 1900+...
So I look at the hardware properties (on a machine with a spec sheet which says Athlon 3800+64 x2, and a badge on the case which says the same) - and it's apparently got a fucking Sempron 3400+ inside! What the fucking fuck?
A glance at the BIOS confirms it - this is not the speedy beast I ordered, but a cut-down piece of gear of not much use to me at all. Damn. HP must have installed a Sempron by mistake, because the details on the website and everything online relating to the model it declares itself to be make no mention whatever of that ever being an option.
Contact customer services... and they have to check to see if it was wrongly advertised; they won't just collect it and replace the machine with what it is supposed to be. Instead it's going to take up to 48 hours to get a response, and then possibly a refund rather than the bargain I had expected, all of which takes me into next week.
Oh well, at least the old PC is still working. There's more to life than upgrading a PC, but I'm a teensy bit ticked off, and frowning a tad as well. |
|
|
