New Dell Inspiron

Long time readers of the blog (read: like a month) know that a few weeks back the house got smacked with an electrical surge and knocked out a bunch of my electronics.  TV should be back online early this week and the router's been replaced.  The only thing remaining was the computer.  It was *probably* OK, but the fan was sounding a bit messed up.  So, it could have been a processor fan, the power source fan, the entire power souce, or a blown heat dector.  Since this computer was a cheapo desktop that I bought about 5 years ago, I figured that now would be a good time to do an upgrade.  The fact that this weekend was tax free weekend sealed the deal.

So, I headed over to best buy on Saturday night.  Apparentely *everyone* else in the greater Raleigh area did too.  They had the computer secrion fortified and you had to wait in line so that you could get an employee one on one.  Not exactly what I was looking for, but whatever.  Turns out it was kinda worth the wait.  I defeinitely appreciated the sales guy narrowing it down and then being able to answer a few technical questions.  (Sadly, still wasn't able to open the machine, but I wouldn't have been able to do that on my own anyways.)

So, tonight, I unboxed it just to take a look.  Now, as a heads up, this is the third desktop that I've owned, and they've all been Dells.  So I've got a bit of basline.  (I wasn't actually even trying to necessarily to buy a Dell... just kinda happened into it.)

So, here's the goods:
4 RAM slots on the motherboard (and they eacch have a port soldered in - for some freaking reason, my last Dell had 4 slots on the board, but only two ports soldered in - WTF?)
Can go up to 8 GB of RAM.
DVD RW Drive.
An Extra 5.25" drive.
Comes with extra ports on the motherboard (PCI, PCI Express, and PCI Express 16x)
Front, Side, And Rear Speaker outputs..  (I'm certainly not going to use them, but I guess that they are nice to have...)
Integrated Card Reader.

And the bad:
It comes with 4 1 GB chips of RAM.  I would have perferred two 2 GB, but we takes what we can gets.)
No more PS2 ports  Everything's USB these days...
The cover is screwed on.  (Damn, Dell, you guys used to do that in the 90s.  I thought that you had gotten past this - just a level would do fine...)
Only 1 Extra PCI port.

So, all in all ... a pretty good deal.  Now all that I have to do is get used to freaking Windows 7.  Which apparently was created by a bunch of jackasses, if their commmercials are to be beleived.

OK...  I just reread this post and it's high on the geek and not so much on the funny.  So, to correct this situation, lemme slip you one of my favorite jokes of all time.  (OF ALL TIME)  Ahem:

How do titillate an ocelote?
You oscillate its tit a lot.

OF ALL TIME.