So it seems that it's not just Australian computer stores that are retards. Faith-go, the store here in Japan I'm ordering my new computer parts from, are pulling one of the oldest computer store tricks in the book on me. "Oh, for sure, we have a huge range of parts. We just don't have any stock of most them at the moment. But we can order them in, no problems!" Well that's fine, and I trusted their little rating system that gave the part I wanted a 'D', meaning 20 to 30 days before it was shipped. I guess I should have known that it meant trouble.

I placed my order nearly 40 days ago. So today, I slaved away and wrote an email, in kanji, to the shop. Along the lines of "where the hell is my computer?" I got a response that made my heart drop. "Oh, sorry, the manufacturer can't tell us when it's going to come in." Fine, that's not your fault, but you could have told me. Computer shops just never think of their customers in these situations. They leave them completely hanging, like my poor housemate Darrell when he was trying to buy a motherboard last year. Advice to all computer shops - if you don't know when a part is going to come in, you keep your customer INFORMED regularly about what's going on. You don't just leave them wondering 10 days after it's supposed to have been in. And you don't write '20 to 30 days' on the 'expected delivery' time, you write 'unknown'. Bloody morons.

Still, I got over my irritation pretty fast and switched back to being positive. I started looking for a new motherboard, and in doing so, actually learnt a bit more about the parts and technology involved in the rest of the computer. So I was able to make a few extra changes to make things that little bit sweeter. Instead of a P35 motherboard, I'm now interested in an X38, to take full advantage of the PCI-E 2.0 speed of my G92 graphics card. They're more expensive and the choice isn't easy, but it looks like I'm going for the Asus P5E. It has mostly nice reviews, and the two good things about it are that a) it's about the same price as the ABIT IP35 Pro was and b) it's a 'B' class item, not a 'D', so only about a week to wait.

Of course, that wasn't the end of things. The P5E apparently doesn't support the Kingston RAM I previously ordered, so I'm upgrading to Corsair, and pushing it up to 4GB instead of 2GB. So I guess maybe some good came of all of this after all. Not to mention the fact that prices on most of the items in my order have dropped somewhat since I placed the order. As the shop stuffed me around I've demanded a re-quote with current prices. The money I save should cover at least half of the increase in price from the extra RAM. That's the least they can do for being idiots. If they don't play ball, I'll simply cancel the order. Oh the joys of cash on delivery. If my money was invested in this right now, I'd be spewing. Let's just hope it all comes together, anyway.