AMD Athlon 850Mhz
256 RAM
27Gb hard disk
Soundblaster Live! 1024
Nvidia RIVA TNT2 32Mb

God damnit I just hate these fuc**ng blue screens!!!

If you're of a nervous disposition please stop reading now...the following true story may make you s--- your pants.

What can go wrong with a new state of the art computer...? not much you'd expect, Ok....so maybe a couple of small glitches here and there, possibly even a few driver/hardware/software clashes..nothing to hard to overcome......how wrong can you be.

Firts boot...everything's going fine, entered the windows reg key, windows detected plug and play monitor etc.....reboot to continue, OK. (approx 30secs later) Windows screen appears, wallpaper appears, icons appear....stupid fuc*ing "Netline" signup box appears, blue screen exception error message appears, keyboard freezes, computer freezes, computer reboots, computer in general goes to s---.

(2 days and one very pissed off tech support guy at the other end of the phone later) Performed reinstallation of Windows 98SE over the top of existing one....success? Don't be stupid. Ran fdisk, reformatted drive (all 27Gb's worth which took bloody ages!) and then reinstalled Windows, success? Almost, access to windows was now possible, installation of other software however was plain ridculous. Numerous crashes, blue screens in abundence, illegal operation errors, you name it I got it.

Did I expect this from a £2,000 computer? Well actually I had my suspicions, but that's another story.

Are they going to replace my system? Yeah right, the best I could get was a repair, and that's gonna take at least 1 1/2 weeks.

Will I EVER trust anyone ever again to sell me a computer? Probably not.

Am I really really pissed of? Wouldn't you be?

The moral of the story.....NEVER NEVER EVER purchase a computer from TIME PROFESSIONAL SYSTEMS. Service is a joke (4 weeks delivery, 3 of those weeks I was expecting a new Pentium 3 820 133Mhz which I was then told had been recalled by Intel. Nevermind, I was told Athlons were almost as fast and that they could "quickly" put me a similar package together). Tech support is a joke, I waited 1 hour to get any help the first time and 45 mins the second time....I could go on but now I'm getting depressed, besides, this post will take to long to load and no one will ever bother to read it all.

s---.

Similar experience 2 years ago. Mail order PCs are a crap-shoot.

Moral of the story?

Build your own PC. It ain't that hard.

Ken

Actually, they were telling you the truth, The 820 chip set has been reclalled do to bugs in its design and ability to use different types of memory. However, AMD are not almost as fast. If you do any serious research you'll find that the AMD Athlon is actually faster AND cheaper then the Intels. I own nothing but AMD computers now and have had no trouble. I would make sure that the motherboard is either made by Epox or another approved AMD vendor. Also, make sure your installing Win98 SE. Earlier versions were buggy at best.

Ok what about this....
I know you dont want to reinstall again
but what if you start from scratch, fdisk the drive and so on. Then load 98, THEN load a good utility like Nortons or something before you try to install ANY software. AND/OR get the patches...

Maybe ya got a bad install cd? I've seen bad cd's before.

...Your Prozac is on the shelf in the medicine cabinet...right next to the empty bottle of Viagra!!

I have been there buddy, we all have our weeks like that. One computer system i bought from Harper-bengle computers crashed the minute i turned it on. Imagine sending out a computer which is running in MSDOS compatability mode....good business pratice?...no.....tiawanese motherboard with tiawanese drivers incompatable with my Diamond V770....oh i could go on and on....

Moral of the story. s--- happens, your not alone. If your going to get a pre-built system, Gateway or Dell or IBM (IBM tech support is the best that i have encounterd, I once had a tech that spend over 6 hours on the phone with me, and he worked over his shif way into the middle of the night(it wasn't IBMs problem anyway but he helped me fix it))

Return it and build your own. Any of the guys here would be happy to walk you through it im sure.

Does sound like there's a hardware problem there, so press them to replace, I don't believe that it can be reliably fixed in the long term. As for Time, I own one and the system itself it excellent, well designed and built, but the support is appalling. You can't even use their support web-site unless you not only own a time computer, but also use their ISP!!!

what i dont understand is i have four computers ,2 custom and 2 from smalled computers makers .ctx and everex .you know what all of these computers run like tanks .tehn run amazingly.
the second custom i dont think it ever had
a bluescreen .the ctx one i could could the blue screens might have a bluescreen one a week .and i have added lots of stuff to it .
what your guys problems are that you get the
stuff the day it comes out and expect it to work ,buy stuff when is been out for a while
get the next best model wait until the tech
guys have heard of all the quirks out of a model .basically wait until the computer are a couple of months old they are cheaper and
they work better .

blue screens make good nightlights, tired of stubbin my friggin toe.

Go see my posting about The Law & You
I made it a new posting to be sure you read it.