A Really Messed Up Shopping Day....

At times, things which appear to be simple and straight forward give you the baddest times of all and you reach at a point where you start thinking that when its going to end? The same kind of thing happened with me, Vaibhav and Sidhu when we left for buying a desktop pc( I actually should call it server. I shall tell the reason of it later) and thought that it won't take not more than 2 hours including our commute time. But what appeared to came in front of us that we spent the whole day trying to get things sorted out which finally came on the track this morning when we were able to install Windows XP 64bit (yes 64 bit, can you guess why I mentioned "server"? No, keep on reading) and also Windows 7,32bit. It ended well but the journey towards the end was surely not smooth and gave us a real tough time.

Sidhu wanted to buy a pc and I suggested to him that he should get a bigger desktop than what "ordinary" people use. What I mean by "bigger" was using a Dual Core Processor, 4gig of RAM. He went one step ahead and declared that he would go for, Quad Core processor , 8 gig of RAM and 1terabyte of hard disk space. Now this is waaay beyond what any normal person would EVER install in his home for "daily" use. This configuration is not normally available in the server boxes as well as they start from 2 gig of RAM. Anyways, we are NOT normal guys, we do distinct work so it was sealed that we are going to get this pc only. Now, the first issue that did arise was that which motherboard we should buy which would support this much of configuration. After doing a lot of research and checking for the avilability in the local place where Sidhu lives( New Delhi) , we zeroed upon a mother board. He went to get the entire thing done at the shop, paid the entire amount as well, only to be told that the board is not available. WTH! He had to come back empty handed(but pockets full with the cash that he got back as he didn't buy anything). Not a good start if you ask me!

I was doing a training here and staying with Sidhu only. My session was going to be over on Friday only but Sidhu was going to buy the pc so I thought I would stay back and would go with him. Vaibhav is another friend and geek who had to attend some tech conference today but he came down 2 days early so that he could meet some of his friends and relatives and also could join the team which would go with Sidhu for his shopping of PC. Well, we all went yesterday at about 10am. There was no shop opened at that time so we decided to sit for some time and have a coffee at Cafe Coffee Day. That was the only 40-50 minutes where we had some smiles and laugh and had a little of fun. I shall post some pics that we took there. Once finished with coffee, we headed straight to the shop from where we were going to buy the machine. Well, not really straight as we stopped in between over Costa Coffee because Vaibhav drinks black coffee and wanted to buy coffee beans for him. We were told that only Costa sells them so we stopped there to "test" some of the beans and to enquire about the price and all. It wasn't too costly but we were not going to buy it at that time so we left after saying thanks. The next distraction came as the next showroom was of Sony Vaio where I stopped to check if they have some good backpack. Guess what they did have one, VGP-CCP4/R. I did like it a lot its compact design and told the guy that I would come back and buy it( I did it as well) and left from there. Finally , we were at the place where we were supposed to get all the components of the machine. We did a lot of to and fro moments in other shops already by the time we were there so we knew what we wanted. Once we were all set, we paid the amount( we had to check 2 teller machines for this as well) and were sent to another shop where all the components were going to get the shape of a full blown machine. We were done over there in a small interval but our joys didn't live for long when we came to know that the power inverter was not there. We had to sit and wait for it. Well, it did came after some good half an hour wait. The next shock was Sidhu wanted to have a "good" wireless key board, mouse combo and we decided to go for Logitech MX3200. Well, to our bad luck, that too was not there in that shop where we were standing so we again had to wait for it. It did come and we left immediately with big smiles all over our faces, thinking that we are done and now, very soon we shall join the big league of 64 bit users, not knowing that there was some thing else decided for us and those smiles were going to go away very soon. Oh by the way, in the mid way, Vaibhav did stop at an LG shoppe to ask the gal standing there about LG's newest LG TV LCD.

When we got back, the first thing that we did was that we had lunch as we were dead tired. After that, immediately, we opened ( or can say ripped open) all the boxes. When Sidhu opened the pack of the key board, he mentioned that the set doesn't look new and appears to be a used one. Also the keys were not functioning properly. Well, we thought at least we should give it a try for once and we tried to use it, only to be assured that the damn thing doesn't work at all. Needless to mention that we were really upset. Vaibhav had to see some of his relatives so me and Sidhu decided to rush immediately go back to the place to get the complete set replaced. It was not even an hour I guess since we bought it and we didn't want to do any more experiments. So we rushed back and talked to the guy who immediately agreed to change the piece. We thought we would check it this time before taking it. Just before we would do that, Sidhu asked to stop after figuring out that the pack doesn't contain all what was mentioned on the outer box. We asked for the complete cash refund which the dealer accepted immediately. After getting the cash back, we bought a standard, wired key board( we had bought a wired mouse already in the first phase) and got back. Well, by that time, it was 7pm and its needless to say that how much tired we were.

After getting back, taking a shower, we were ready to install Windows 7. Well, the damn thing didn't start at all for the installation. We even did install Windows 2000 but it was no luck. I guess its worth to mention that all the versions we were installing were of 32bit but they should had got installed anyways. Sidhu thought of a clever trick that may be seeing this much of RAM(8gig) , these windows are getting confused( 32bit can't use more than 4gig) so he removed 4gig of RAM and guess what, IT WORKED! We installed Windows 7 successfully! But this is a server machine and we needed 64bit operating system only to test it fully. Time to go for another run of installation of Windows XP64 bit. Well, we did it today morning and yes, its working dandy! We can say that we have a full blown server running in our living room here :-) . Anyone wants to have his database being hosted here , I can assure we would give early bird discounts ;-) !

I shall be leaving soon from here back to home but this was one of the experiences which I don't think I wanted to have but I guess, it has helped us all in some way or the other! As it is said that if it ends well than its fine( I guess I have messed up really well the actual phrase but you must have got the sense) so I guess we are smiling. Let's see now how much Sidhu can beat this server and make it cry doing all of those installations that are enough to make any normal desktop cry. I can see a lot of blog posts coming by Sidhu :-) .

Update:

Vaibhav just posted a post about the same(not exactly though as it contains stuff about his birthday, travel, novel as well ;-) ) ,mentioning 3 of us as partners in crime LOL! You can read the entire post here.