Well gang, I know I myself, am guilty of this...

This is the "Ooooooooo-Ahhhhhh... That kicks SO much ass, I'm buyin' that first thing it comes out!" new product desire.

The reviewers all gave it 5 stars, the company sez it's the finest product they have EVER put out... you wait for weeks until it becomes available to the public, and you're the first one at the door at "Best Buy" the morning it's released! You're drooling to get it home and plug it up...

...And it doesn't work with your PC configuration.

So... you wait patiently for a patch and/or a reply from the company as to what the hell to do. In the meantime, you're bummin' 'cause your ultra-fast, l337 video card or whatever is sittin' on the shelf. Your hard-earned cash has bought you a VERY expensive doorstop in a pretty box... you know they'll get it together and release an update for people with your problem, but will it be this year?!?

There is a way to avoid this... this is called "Wait a Month"... if you can hold off for one month after a product is released... you can hit their web-site and find out known issues, whether or not it's got flaws, or any of hundreds of other little tips the company has learned "The hard way" after they launched their initial run 'cause they didn't have every machine known to man sitting on their desks in the lab.

Also, you can find out whether or not the hype is living up to expectation.

Most businesses will NOT buy brand new computers (as in just available)... and especially not parts! They will go with something tried and true for at least 3 to 9 months! They cannot afford downtime for faulty equipment (and it's one of the reasons troubleshooting tends to be easier on network admins than those in the field with home users.

I know you're going to want to put your Llama neighbor in his place by building a machine with parts that will make him cry himself to sleep at night... but it's best to wait just 4 weeks after a product is released. It could save you a lot of heartache!

doubly true right now with the new spring product releases, (GeForce FX anyone?)

Quote: Originally posted by Darksamurai They will go with something tried and true for at least 3 to 9 months!

The Canadian military favours technology that has proven true over 6-9 years!

A great deal (read most) of the comps I have seen are still running win 95!

Put... an outfit I worked with in California was using dummy terminals and a mainframe from the 70s!

The owner was one of those "Work harder, not smarter" types who could have replaced 5 technical workers making well over 50 grand a year... with even the first 50 grand he could have competely redone the data entry pool (which is where I was... does it help to say the keyboards were from the 70s too? They had to special order parts from England when they went down... which they didn't do often. My keyboard didn't have an E or an Z... so I had to hit the little tab where it was...) and replaced that mainframe (which was taking up valuable warehousing room) with a single pentium II or better. Gotta figure... 5 workers, x50,000 a year... 250,000 dollars a year... guy would have recovered the losses in the first three months....

Still, I guess I can't complain... technical work is already scarce.

70 of the computers I support are still running NT4 with Office 97. And don't even mention AMD to any of the procurement managers, they freak out if it is non-Intel.

Just about all the systems are my school are running WinNT, while a few of the newer are running 2k and even fewer are running 98. There are perhaps 3 computers with XP on them. At work, its the same. AMD doesn't exist in the sphere cast by my school and work.

Heh, heh... if and when I get going on a business (I'm still doing research), and I end up with a lot of people working for me needing machines...

I'll probably build and mod 'em just for the sheer pleasure of doing it... I'll use the same O/S and parts for all of 'em (it makes troubleshooting SO much easier to be able to just cannibalize a rig to fix a couple others and not have to load anything... also one set of discs fixes everything).

I think I'd go Athlon for the cost factor... but ya gotta realize, AMD still hasn't shaken off the rep of not being COMPLETELY x86 compatible. I've enountered 4 programs that refuse to run on the old Athlons... My neighbor had an Athlon 700 Mhz when my family had a 750 Mhz P3. She kept finding programs that wouldn't work on her rig, so she ask me to test 'em for her... They always ran on my Pentium.

My old man refuses Athlons because Dbase won't run on 'em (I'll be testing that theory on my 1800+ in a day or so).

Athlon has come a long way, but they still have that rep... that's why a lot of companies still go Intel I do believe...