I've burned 18 CDs worth of MP3s, pictures, and other miscellaneous files from my computer, and I'm going to format my hard drive this evening when I'm finished working. I'm also going to take all the peripherals out of my system and add them one at a time after installing Windows again. Hopefully I'll be able to resolve my sound and USB problems, and maybe I'll even get my 6.4GB Quantum drive working again, but I'm not too sure about that. I'm sure I'll run into some problems, so it may be awhile before I'm back online--that is, if I don't get frustrated and use a sledgehammer to fix the problems.

By the way, the CDRW drive I bought works damn well. I got it at Sam's Club, it's a 24X10X40, and I paid $90 for it. I was wary about buying hardware from Sam's Club, but it turned out better than buying that piece of shit a few weeks ago from these guys--pretty soon I'll have a full review on my site of their shitty service and customer support, and hopefully I'll dissuade at least a few people from buying there.

One of my friends bought a flat panel monitor from there, and he didn't have any problems with it. Brand new -- $150. :)

I'm not saying the products they sell are necessarily crappy (but watch out if you buy a CDRW drive from them--they'll sell you my broken one and tell you there's nothing wrong with it). The people who work there are just complete idiots when it comes to computers.

Yeah... what makes a company like that worth going back to or not is the quality of their support. Anyone can just move products. --If you get something that's in good working condition, then everything's fine. But whether or not they're willing to work with you (and admit that you really do know what you're doing if you do.) really makes a difference when you do have problems.

And it's not limited to small retailers like that... I absolutely hate Gateway because of their crappy support. We used to have a lot of Gateways at work and any time we had a part go bad or something their support people would treat me like I was an amateur who didn't know anything about the machine I was working on. It would take like an hour anytime I called since they went through a hundred troubleshooting steps that were either irrelevant, or obvious ones that I had already tried before determining that the problem was what I had originally told them it was in the first place. I actually got to the point where I would just fake that I was doing what they would tell me to do, pretending that I was sitting in front of their broken machine all the while I was doing something else. :)

no no no, he bought the monitor from sam's. :)

A flat panel for $150? New??? 15"?? That sounds way too cheap. I don't remember ever seeing one for much under $275.

But then, I've never seriously shopped around for lcd's.

chris, it wasn't a flat panel, it was a flat screen, as in full sized trinitron monitor, but it does rule.

That makes sense then... pretty good price still for a Trinitron tube.