Well just got done reloading Win7 again. I think this may be the fifth time.
I beat the heck out of the system all day Wednesday running stress tests, copy files from one drive to another, basically trying to make it fail. Not even a hiccup. Set up the two SAS drives as RAID0 and beat up on it some more. Not even a whimper. So I loaded a few apps and used the system for the rest of the evening, and it seemed real solid to me.
Had a doctor's appt. this morning, so I didn't get to crank it up till around noontime. Damn.... Got a startup failure. It chugged away for a VERY long time saying it was trying to repair the damage, and yes it did finally start up eventually. But obviously I didn't have any faith in the system. I contacted the place I bought the system from (AVAdirect) and they suggested I upgrade the system to SP1. OK, I'm game. There were some other critical updates in the queue so I ran them as well, to try to bring everything uptodate.
The SP1 update took a fair amount of time and eventually completed, and I had high hopes this might take care of the problem. But there was a notice that my antivirus program wasn't running. Hmm.. I clicked on the desktop link and it wouldn't start up. So I figured it needed to be reloaded, possibly something getting botched during that SP1 update. So I went to the Uninstall screen to uninstall it, and was quite surprised to see that nearly all of the apps I had installed were not in the list. I tried to run a few of the programs and they gave me bogus error messages saying that I did not have enough memory or not enough disk space, which was completely nuts. It was basically a fresh system, so resources were at their peak. So AVAdirect suggested rolling back to a setpoint before the SP1 update, which I did. After the dust settled, the same problem existed with the Uninstall screen and those apps still would not run. Oh, I tried to just overwrite the antivirus program with a fresh install, but of course that failed with some inane error message.
So I figured that SP1 update hosed me but good. AVAdirect made some goofy damn statement like "gee, your system sure is picky about the programs it runs". Wish the guy was here, because I would have choked him. I've been running those apps far a LONG time, and matter of fact they are running on my laptop (that I am using right now) which is also running Win7 SP1 without any issues.
Anyway, I'm only going to load Win7 and all the updates including SP1 and not load ANY of my apps onto it and just use IE and see what happens. I'm thinking I'm probably going to be packing that system up on Monday and shipping it back to AVAdirect with a note to either replace everything in the box, or just give me my money back..
Oh, forgot one detail. AVAdirect said that perhaps the SSD drive (which is my C: drive) needs a firmware update. Well I checked with the manufacturer and the model of my SSD is noted as *EOL. Which, I believe, stands for End Of Life. Basically meaning it is obsolete and not supported any longer. This is an OCZ Apex SSD, by the way. And I have had this new system for just a bit under two years, so it's not like this is some archaic piece of hardware here.
So yeah, I'm about getting fit to be tied.
Is it too much to ask for to just get what you paid for and have a reasonable expectation that it will WORK as advertised? I am moderately fluent with this PC crap, and can't imagine the horror someone completely out of their depth of water would be feeling having to deal with this sort of crap. I do wish that when I was considering buying an Apple that they didn't have that nickle ninety-eight cheesy keyboard on the demo models. I might have bought one if not for that poor excuse for a user interface. Heck you can tell they are embarrassed as hell about the keyboard because they will RARELY show the darn think in their photo ad copy. Well darn, put a REAL keyboard on the system, then! Don't just try to hide it.
Sometimes I think the whole darn world has just gone insane.....
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It could actually be a driver somewhere botching up the system. Wouldn't be the first time that has happened.