A New Horse In The Stable

I’ve had the itch for a new desktop for a while. My current desktop is a small form factor unit I built from a bare-bones kit from American Media Systems. It’s been a great machine, but it’s really, really noisy. Although it hasn’t shown any signs of letting up, I wanted to put myself on a new “workhorse” desktop, perhaps with some more bells and whistles. I also wanted to purchase something this year for tax purposes. I thought about building my own system again, but I opted not to do that this time around. Just not enough time to putz around, although I may build a gaming rig in the future, but it wouldn’t be a business machine.

Although I don’t have any strong opinions for or against Dell, I didn’t want to go down that road. And then I saw it. A really decent HP box at Circuit City… HP Media Center m7250n Desktop PC. 2.8GHz Pentium-D Dual Core, 1gb DDR-2 RAM, 250gb SATA HDD, XP MCE 2005, decent sound and graphics. What hooked me was the fact that after $170 rebates ($120 Circuit City + $50 HP rebate), the PC would be $849.00. The Circuit City rebate was “Web-only” and expired on 11/26, so I had to act quickly. I made the purchase online, and specified I would do an in-store pick up.

So I drove the mile or so to the Circuit City and picked it up and was back home all in less than an hour. The crowds weren’t nearly as bad as I expected. Perhaps it was the “temporarily sold out of XBox 360″ signs helped keep the masses away. I thought briefly about keeping the PC boxed up until the remodeling work was done in my home office, but I couldn’t resist.

I tethered it to my KVM, connected it to my LAN, and fired it up… and fired it up… ummm. Tried to fire it up. Folks, I had a lemon on my hands! When I connected it to power, the lights came on and the fan spun up, but after a few seconds, it just went dead and would not respond to the power switch. Hmmm. Not good. I boxed it back up and drove right back to Circuit City.

The people there had me take it back to the tech bench in the back of the store - they wanted their tech to confirm it was a dud. He did. After some paperwork, I drove back home with a “new” new PC, and this one was fine. After all was said and done, I wasn’t terribly upset - lemons do happen.

I haven’t done much with it yet. Normally, I would strip out the factory loaded image and put my own installation of XP Pro on, but in this case, I wanted to keep the original XP MCE 2005 OS on. So instead, I uninstalled most of the crap that was pre-loaded… trial versions of MS Office, Quicken, various ISP offers, etc. God I hate the bloatware. In some cases, it can really make the user experience harder than it needs to be.

I won’t entirely switch over to this as my main production PC until I re-do my office, which should be in the next 2-3 weeks. I may also drop in a new video card, because surprisingly, the ATI Radeon X300 SE PCI-E card did NOT have a DVI output port… and I would prefer to use an all digital connection to my 20″ Viewsonic LCD monitor. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the Media Center aspect of this machine. Ideally, I want to try out the television and PVR features, but I don’t have a cable TV outlet near my desk (it’s clear across the room). I’m trying to picture how I can rectify that situation. I threw some old fashioned rabbit ear antennas on the TV tuner card, but the picture is horrible on most of the low VHF channels.

Still, that’s a great buy, isn’t it? Knowing the Gnomie crowd has its share of bargain hunters, I’m sure somebody will top me.

[tags]desktop,circuit city,bargain pc,hp media center m7250n[/tags]