After a few weeks of hiccups and terrible customer service, I’ve finally gotten Kevin’s PC in his house with games installed, and he’s very happy.
The terrible customer service was on the part of OverClockers UK. He’d bought a motherboard from them, the GA-H55M-UD2H, and it was faulty. So we sent it back with a note explaining everything we did, and that the fault was intermittent. The problem wouldn’t occur until the build had been running for over an hour. They sent it back the very next day with a note that said “Aint nothing wrong with it. You musta plugged it in wrong.”
So we tried it again, and got the same problem. I sent it back again, they sent it straight back and charged me for the pleasure. I contacted Consumer Direct, who are awesome by the way, and they helped me out. But the problem is still to be solved, so we bought a different motherboard from a different company and it’s working fine. But there’s no problem with the board, apparently.
The only problem is that these things never happen as isolated incidents for me. Another is after some help with his thesis software. It turns out the the bespoke software – that his lecturer has written – will only work on Windows XP. This wouldn’t usually be a problem, except that he’s just bought a Windows 7 laptop and the software refuses to work on Windows 7.
Since he’s only just bought the laptop he doesn’t want to void his warranty by installing a useful operating system (I.E non-proprietary), he wants to get some virtualization software on there. But here’s the kicker , he doesn’t want to pay the hefty price tag to run the software. Apparently, Microsoft have a product that he could use. Except that it will only run on Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate editions, and he has the Home edition on his laptop.
Here’s where open source software wins, yet again. Since there a more than a few virtualization tools out there available for free (Xen and Virtual Box spring to mind) that can do all that the proprietary tools can, and more.
Shame really.
