I have never been one to assume that people are sexist, I like to give people credit because I believe that sexist=moron so I don’t like to think that it’s the case. I know that most people aren’t going to try to put together their own PC, even in our DIY culture, and I would like to think that if someone was trying to put together a computer that they’d know what they were doing.

I guess I am not always right in thinking that other people feel the same way. I went into a few PC stores recently when I was spec’ing up my uber gaming PC – but in a few places I was asked if I “had someone to help me” put it together and other similar sentiments.

Feeling disappointed with the attitudes I had to put up with when going to a store, I embarked upon an exhaustive online search to find the parts I wanted online and in the meantime I read a ton of reviews to be sure I was getting primo stuff. I wanted to buy from a Canadian store, and I narrowed the options down to NCIX and newegg.com. Newegg had all of my items in the cart and I even pressed the checkout button but they don’t take PayPal so I decided to go with NCIX. I tried to use the online interac but it didn’t work and I work near an NCIX so I decided to just go in there and get the stuff, which was in stock there.

Apprehensively, I went to NCIX, whom I’d had a bad experience with a few years back when I tried to return some RAM (for my boyfriend, the RAM we got just didn’t detect in his PC, which was pretty aged at the time, and when they didn’t have an appropriate replacement we tried to get a refund but they were extremely resistant and they didn’t want to give us one but they caved in, eventually). I went to the store and talked to the sales clerk, who got someone to retrieve my order and then another sales guy helped me. I inquired about the Bigfoot Killer M1 NIC and he said that it wasn’t recommended. I asked why he said that because I believe that it couldn’t be a bad thing due to the fact that it has an independed CPU for network processing that controls and streamlines your UDP traffic so your main CPU can dedicate its cycles to other functions and UDP traffic is what’s important for online gaming because that’s how your location and player data is updated (amongst other things, but I digress…) so if you say it is no good then I’d like to hear why. His response was that he didn’t play online games. lol!

Anyhow, after much waiting I got all my stuff and took a cab home, seeing as I have no car, and put it all together. I decided on the Antec Nine Hundred case and it’s truly a sexy case. The clear side allows you to see all my nifty blue LEDs and cool stuff inside. It has several large case fans and I’ve always liked the ease of access you get with an Antec case. The access on top that gives you sound controls and USB is great too. There is a little area for you to put things (complete with a silicone non-slip insert) – the bf asked me if it’s a drink holder (because that would be a silly idea) but I said no. We decided it was a doobie holder.

The moment of truth… I powered it on and was disappointed to find that it wouldn’t POST. I plugged things into different power plugs on my modular power supply, moved RAM to te other slots, unplugged hard drives but still to no avail. Sadness overwhelms me. Especially since I am pretty certain that it’s a hardware failure and I have no spare parts to test. A few days pass, in which I lose sleep about what could be wrong and sweat over the money I spent.

I took the computer back today, with the help of a friend with a car, and spoke to a nice fellow there at the service desk who tested my power supply, it tested fine, and agreed with me it’s probably a mobo failure. Huzzah! Now I have to undo all my work and pull it apart but I’m glad that I didn’t have to put up with macho crap. I did feel the need to drop that I’ve been working in tech support for 10 plus years but I hope in the future that I won’t have to anymore. Perhaps my uber rig gave him that impression anyway but a gamer does not a tech make, I guess it definitely helps though.