However, there is a bright side.
Since the machine isn't going to arrive any time soon, I hied myself off to Fry's in Palo Alto yesterday morning. It took me about 90 minutes to buy all the necessary parts, starting with a Microstar K7T Turbo Raid motherboard with a 1Ghz Athlon. I got a 40GB ATA100 drive, 56x CD-ROM, 32 MB TNT2 video, 256MB RAM, full tower case (I plan to put a bunch of drives in this thing eventually), floppy, keyboard, mouse, IEEE 1394 (Firewire) interface, and 10/100 ethernet card.
Spent about three hours in the afternoon putting it all together, another hour installing Windows 2000, and 15 minutes installing Mandrake Linux.
(it wasn't until after I read this that I realized what I'd just said. I have installed Windows perhaps 50 times (though Win2K only twice) -- and it still took an hour. I've never installed Linux before, and I was running in 15 minutes -- although today I will download some more stuff if I can and add it to the system).
Total cost, about $825, or perhaps $150 more than the Gateway (after tax & shipping). I got twice the RAM, four times the drive space, 1394, more drive bays, and better video (I'm not a big gamer, but I figured something better than a super vga was in order), and Linux installed.
I'm still writing this on my PowerBook, but I have tested the Linux browser and it works.
I've always wanted to build a system from scratch (I've upgraded PCs many times, replacing everything except the MoBo, but never built), and yesterday I did it!
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