I have to buy a new pc. As anyone who IMs me or tries to play online with me knows, my pc freezes and crashes and generally acts like it's in the early stages of death. The current consensus is that the hard drive is going, and it does seem to be getting worse... so long and short, Sophina is buying a new PC.

Now, I don't know how to build my own, and I don't have a handy pc genius floating around who wants to build one for me. Furthermore, I've got a hoard of gift cards to Circuit City that I'm using to beef up my underwhelming financial prowess, so it's a prebuilt machine for me. Buying from an electronics store comes with the annoyance of not being able to customize... well, anything.

Can't customize your features, can't customize your software package, can't customize your OS.

I'm not ready to move to Vista. I still have Windows 95 games I want to install! But I don't have any choice in the matter, since my prebuilt PC will come with Vista preinstalled and I'll have to pay extra to get them to take it off, and paying any more than is strictly necessary is right out, so Vista it is.

The most obnoxious thing about Vista is the fact that you don't get a physical copy of the OS when you buy it. I don't want an activation code and a download for reinstalls. I want a hard copy I can keep in my desk drawer in preparation for the inevitable reformat I'm going to need in a year or so. I can order a hard copy separately if I want it, but MS will charge me 12.99 for it. 12.99, hardly an unreasonable price for a whole operating system... except that by that time I will have already purchased it.

This falls under the worst of copy protection and digital distribution tactics. You don't want to pay for things that are already included in your game? What about things that should have been included in your game? I don't want to have to buy my OS backup disc, something I'm almost guaranteed to need.

Bad enough that my current copy of XP is flagged as invalid just because I've reinstalled from it so many times. Bad enough that I have to call Microsoft and fight with their customer service to reinstall my own legitimate copy of their software to the same exact machine (is it their business how often I reinstall? I bought the license fair and square...). Now I'm going to have to do the same thing with a license I own only digitally and don't even have that hard copy to work with. So I'm entirely dependent on your goodwill as to whether or not I can reinstall at all. Unless I want to pay again for a hard copy. Sweet. Way to punish the honest user.