Minimum Redundancy

_{My new PC one week after ordering!}

For quite a while now have I been toying with the idea of building a new PC. And finally at these last throes of summer, I have been given the means and time to build it. So on August 28th I placed an order, which I expected on the 29th, or if worst came to worst on the 30th. Sure enough, I got about 60% of my order on the 30th. Yet As I write this on september 4th, vital elements of my monster order have yet to arrive. The question that has been echoing through my mind for the last week has been: how could this happen?

A mental block is preventing me to do anything else but write this post. An attempt to vent my frustration that won't cause physical harm. I have been phoning numerous services and institutions and informing them about how their services and institutions, unbeknown to them, aren't working as advertised. Sadly I have gained little, save contempt. I have been getting one excuse after another and people pointing to someone else. Though it's quite clear that the whole system lacks efficiency. Belgium's motto: 'power in unity' is a terrible joke. May I suggest 'slowly but surely*' ?

The order I placed was with my favorite PC shop Forcom. I had used their services in the past, been to their shops and had nothing to report but praise: excellent range, quick deliveries, friendly service. So I called on them again for this order, expecting the same. But the expectations they had set in the past remained very much so. Browsing their site I made sure all the items I selected were in stock as to ensure a quick delivery. I wasn't fussy about price because I was convinced that less fuss would be good for all parties. Little did I know the inverse was true. Rarely have I paid such a large sum of money for the lesson that good service really is priceless.

Rarely have I paid such a large sum of money for the lesson that good service really is priceless.

The reason why, I found out while chatting with the very reasonable Forcom employee, is that Forcom was recently bought by a bigger chain of PC hardware stores called EuroSys and how they changed the delivery system to a system that couldn't quite deliver. You see, the way it used to be was that Forcom would build one big package which included all parts before sending it by courier. In contrast Eurosys sends all parts separate using separate couriers, which will arrive at separate times, hopefully during the same day. Which is what I experienced on the 30th. Eurosys also doesn't use its stores (including those of Forcom) as places to send from, voiding all the guarantees that items are available as shown on the website. Rather they need to be available in the general storehouse which is not indicated online. Making it impossible to judge if an item is available, and since their general storehouse appears to be a lot smaller and limited than either one of the stores dotted around the country a '24h delivery of available items' on www.forcom.com is just false advertising. Plain and simple.
While Forcom's man agreed with me that getting 60% of my order within 48 hours and having to wait for the rest to show up for another 190+ hours was absurd he was unable to do something about it. As it stood, a further 20% would arrive on Wednesday and the remainder would arrive on the next Friday. To my surprise he managed to allow for both deliveries to arrive on Wednesday September 4th. As he would send them all at once, using the post office's 'within 24h delivery guaranteed!' service.

Things were looking up, I received a notice that my order was sent on Tuesday, set to arrive on Wednesday morning. As I got up early to eagerly await my long overdue goods, I waited...
Annoyed I went to go see if the mail had arrived at all and found two blank receipts on the floor (eg: not in my mailbox), left there by the mailman. The receipts for the '24h premium delivery' sent yesterday told me my order would be available in the nearest post office from tomorrow onwards...

Now, parcel delivery usually works like this: a mailman carries a package to the address and delivers it. If no one is there to receive the parcel, a receipt is left to inform the addressee that the parcel is available for pickup at the nearest post office. The receipt also specifies when the door was rang unanswered. I my case; I took the day off (again, and will be 4 in total when all said and done), I was home, I was waiting, I did not hear anyone ring the door. I found receipts on the floor with nothing on it save the name of the illiterate (the receipts are personalized by the company) on who I would have to direct my scorn.

As I stood there fuming for a little while, my world shrank to the slip in my hand and it got very quiet. I'm only a very violent person within the confines of my own mind, but the walls very nearly came down. I had to act.

Minutes later I was stomping my way towards the local post office, only a few hundred meters from where I live. I imagine the look on my face must not have been very pleasant but the case of tunnel vision I was suffering was too bad to mind my fellow man. I was near blackout as I finally swung open the door at the post office, where pleasant, conditioned air presented me with the vision of one pretty, young girl and one hunched over postal crone at the desk, either one of which would have to deal with me. I had to get in line with one of those numbered slips made to ensure order in the picking line, a feeble instrument to make me wait even more. I wished I would get the old crow at the desk to resolve my case, because otherwise the frail young thing at the other desk would have to bear the full brunt of my indignant rage. Yet, so it was. I took a deep breath and slammed the fistful of excuse-notes on her desk. Within a few lines of my vitriolic complaint the crone directed her attention away from her business to save princess's first day at the post office by telling me there was little I could do apart from filing a complaint on the website. Which to me meant I could do nothing at all. Because it wouldn't solve my problem. All I got was a reassurance my package was 'in a protected circuit within the posting company', which I thought was rather funny.
I did make a formal complaint to complete this elaborate exercise in futility. In the modest conversation I had with the post office customer service, "chain of incompetence" is the only harsh sentence I used but I don't think it fazed the telephone operator much.

I can understand that in their eyes I am a madman who can't just wait another night, what they don't know is that I've been waiting all week and am now asked to wait another day where it should have been just the other day, given the expectations I had when forking over a month's worth of wages. Not to mention all the time that was lost waiting.

All I can do now is hope the delicate electronics get here in one piece, if not: expect my next blog from a mental hospital.

All I can say right now is to stay away from Forcom and Eurosys until it's made clear they have fixed their faulty system. As for the Bpost, the Belgian Postal company: please send your employees to school before you send them to customers, even if that's beyond the scope of requirements.

Maximum Redundancy

Installing and playing Crysis3 on my pc has made something crystal clear: my gaming PC is an ancient machine. This is somehow ironic. First of all because I am a big PC gaming advocate boasting about power and secondly, because this machine was assembled to play the cryengine (in the form of Crysis). Which ran like treacle on my previous PC, causing me to had a mental revelation that it desperately needed a replacement. And so I invested one of my very first wages into a new PC.

Back then, I also got the chance to get my hands on Windows Vista. I liked the rock solid performance of the thing, it never crashed. It was however, quite a memory hog. Making it clear that from day one that I wasn't quite done upgrading. After a RAM update, from 2 to 4GB, I upgraded my Nvidia GFX 8800 to a ATI 4780, which I had to replace later on with a Nvidia GTX 460. The CPU got upgraded from a Intel duo E8200 to an Intel q9505. This last upgrade almost didn't happen because the line of processors had become obsolete at that time, it had been for a while, and as such wasn't being sold except for reparations. That was only just two years ago.
Yes, this is by far the oldest PC I've ever had. If I keep it around for another half a year, it'll be 6 years old. But it's still going, pretty much without a hitch if not a chug. From the Vista days I noticed that the HD would sometimes tick, tick, tick and tick, making programs hang until the ticking ceased. At first I thought nothing of it. This was a new PC, what could possibly be wrong? So I ignored it. However, Vista picked up a few issues and got less dependable. The system files got broken and repaired a bit too frequent.
To fix it, I got Windows 7! installing it over Vista may have been a mistake but for a while, all was well. The ticking HD however was still there. A minor nuisance! Or so I thought. It started lasting longer. It certainly sounded mechanical enough to worry me slightly. So the inevitable happened and I got a blue screen when the system started ticking on the windows startup screen. This would have sent me in a vengeful panic, BETRAYAL MOST FOUL, if I didn't have most of my data backed-up or in the cloud.

BETRAYAL MOST FOUL!

However I was slightly ticked off at the delayed start-up. When the windows repair process ticked to a grinding halt as well, I was rather more annoyed. I started making plans to deal with this PC.
So I switched it off and twiddled my thumbs for a while in a suitably malicious manner. This happened on a hot summer evening, so I tried really hard to keep my senses in the simmering swampy city heat. Later that evening I had cooled down. I switched the PC back on. Mercifully, it booted just fine and I was relieved. I blamed the heat for the ticking problem. And it never got that bad again.

Until last January.

It finally dawned on me: the many reboots, error-checking and error repairing the system had to do, seemingly without reason, have had their toll on the files on the disk. Many important system files were 0kb in size. I could no longer adjust my keyboard and mouse settings because the configuration windows no longer existed. A DISASTER!

A DISASTER!

Because this was the middle of Black Ops 2 season and I wanted to toy around with my Razer Imperator's sensitivity settings. My indignant rage instantly returned in full force. THE HUMANITY!

THE HUMANITY!

A full system scan of whatever prompt command launched it showed me that there was no easy way to repair this avalanche of system errors.

That was the drop. On my hands was a PC that didn't have all the necessary (or unnecessary) functions and that couldn't go on. So I considered just getting a new PC, as I figured an upgrade was long overdue. But of course I had another option: reinstall windows 7, the 64bit version this time. The more economic option too. And in a way a small upgrade if it meant I could access the full 4gigs of ram. So I backed up all my remaining data and I mentally prepared myself for the fresh, blank windows desktop I'd eventually reach - and the experience of a most profound horror vacuum you only get when you see your own Personal Computer devoid of all the personal stuff.

the experience of a most profound horror vacuum you only get when you see your own Personal Computer devoid of all the personal stuff.

But also, happily, free of errors. Efficient. And this time I was surprised to see, or rather hear, no more ticking.
The system performs well again. But enough to keep it for another year? I think not. As I mentioned up top, Crysis3 isn't good to this PC. I play on LOW everything and even had to dig into a few custom configurations to disable default high-end features, just to try to keep the frame rate near 60fps. Truth be told though, 30fps may even be too much to hope for. Crysis3 is of course only one game, and I can play other games that aren't Crysis3 just fine.

As a new console cycle is revving up and new game engines are about to appear. It makes sense to get a new PC now and aim a fair bit higher than the new console specs. A guarantee it'll be able to play whatever game comes out in the foreseeable future. And I don't intent to skimp on the budget this time. A good PC can last a very long time even on a budget, so It's well worth the investment. At least that's what I think.
I'm still holding off upgrading for now though. We already have definitive info on the Playstation4: it's very much like a PC. But we still need to see exactly what Microsoft will do with the next Xbox console. Already it seems that the AMD dominated console hardware could influence PC game performance - the next Xbox and WiiU both also use AMD-made silicon. Should games be coded for the AMD graphics cards like the latest Tomb Raider was, it might not be the best idea to get an NVidia graphics card. It may be a bit too early to tell. More research is needed, as it is every time I purchase a piece of hardware. I am curious though, to learn what has changed.