We're all quite dumb

I ordered parts for a new computer off newegg over the last couple of days, only to discover to my joy that the motherboard (and possibly the motherboard chipset) may have data corruption issues and that, moreover, the hard drives, which I bought because they're supposed to be super-quiet, have huge problems running with anything that's not like one Intel-based chipset. Better still, they don't work well with computers that support RAID, when part of the whole point of this upgrade was that I could set up a RAID array and stop worrying all the time that the latest version of my manuscript was going to blow up unless I backed it up that instant.

Argh.

The solution may involve half-assembling several computers, downloading drivers onto floppies (floppies!), updating the hardware repeatedly, and generally drinking beer and growing increasingly frustrated.

So at some point this week, which is goingn swimmingly already, I'm going to get a boatload of computer equipment and throw it together knowing full well that there's a 90% chance it's only going to give me trouble.

This is why people buy Dells. Yeah, they suck, yadda yadda yadda. But you don't buy a Dell off the shelf and find out that when you plug the keyboard in acid squirts out of the monitor into your eyes. In fact, lemme just look.... about $500 more. That's not bad, for no acid squirting.

I'm still amazed though that this is still where technology is: not just that hard drive firmware has to be flashed, but that the process has to be so freaking horrible. If everyone's going to build crappy products that blow up all the time and are compatible in degrees, couldn't they make the process to fix those inevitable problems modestly less painful?

I'm hoping the grocery store has some cheap beer on sale this weekend, because I suspect that's the only way I'm going to get through this.