Dead City Sunbeams

As it turns out, the too-good-to-be-true offer in the MDG advertisement was, in fact, too good to be true. The crucial omission in the $697 system is the lack of an OS. With Windows XP running $200 or so, it stops being a particularly good bargain and starts being deceptive advertising. Edit: Aparently I forgot to mention that the salesmen informed me that they would not actually sell me a computer without an OS on it, because Microsoft would sue them or something. (Is that some agreement they have to sign? Could I have bought one with Linux on it?) Though they would install it for a mere $75 if I brought in my own CD...

MDG itself is an odd place. I was expecting something like BCOM--a store packed to the rafters with video cards, sound cards, memory chips, hard drives, CD drives, speakers, video accelerators, peripherals of all kinds, as well as monitors, keyboards, mice, and CPUs. Instead, it looked more like an insurance broker with a computer repair shop in the back. There were four desks and a couple of stacks of boxes(of what looked like those printer/scanner/copier things), in a fairly large space, so it seemed cavernously empty. The guys I talked to seemed much more salesmanly than techie, though the one guy was at least forthright enough about the lack of an operating system in their supposed bargain system, though he then pointed me to the one that was $300 more expensive. After talking it over with Nicole, I decided not to buy it. I was getting the kind of bad feelings that iamo had intuited. So I basically just took a half-hour detour out to 170th St. on my way home from work. Well, even rush hour traffic is not too bad if I have my music to listen to. (And boy, "O'Malley's Bar" is one heck of a long song...)

So I am still lumbering at 433 MHz through Windows 98 SE. I'll survive. And hey, Nicole's literary agent called and there's potential good news on the publishing front, though I won't divulge any details just yet.