Alas, the local PC shop I loved and used for years went bust. If they still existed I'd have taken my old PC to them months ago, and never bothered with doing my own upgrades and trouble shooting. I always said they would build my next PC for me, when the time finally came to stop upgrading and start from afresh. Great shop; they used to fix tiny problems for free if it was quick, and gave advice over the phone for things to try before you brought the PC in. That's maybe why they went bust ...

Ordered from Novatech today, should be here Tuesday. I'm going to have to stick in the extras myself. Oh well, theoretically a video card, two sticks of RAM, a CD/DVD drive, and my old pair of hard drives should be simple plug and go work. This time I won't be working on a machine with a failing motherboard. :crosses fingers and tells herself over and over that her foul luck will not continue to plague her:

Made some tweaks to the system, made it cheaper but better. No hard drive this time: I'm using the pair from my old system. When assembling the parts for the custom build at Aria I was forced to add a HD, understandably. This time I can leave it out. No sound card; since the card I wanted was out of stock and would delay the order. I'll get one seperately, if the onboard sound isn't good enough. I only use desktop stereo speakers so I don't need anything too grand. I swapped the x1950 XTX for a BFG geforce 8800 GTS 640mb, as it was only £28 more expensive and slightly more powerful to say the least. Slightly cheaper Corsair RAM this time, identical to the dominator stuff in all aspects but the possibility of having fans added; I'll never need that. Dumped the Sony CD/DVD drive - found out it was quite a noisy model. I picked a quiet, good performing Samsung instead.

1 x BB-C2D6PB Barebones Bundles Intel E6600 Core2Duo Heatsink and Fan,
1024mb DDR2 667 Ram, MSI Intel 975X PCI Express Motherboard

1 x BFG-88GTS BFG GeForce 8800GTS 640MB HDCP Enabled Dual DVI PCI
Express (500MHz Core Clock) (1600MHz Memory Clock) (1200MHz Shader clock)

1 x CSR-X642G Corsair XMS6400 2GB DDR2 (2x1GB) 800Mhz Non-ECC

1 x SAM-S182D Samsung Dual Layer 18x DVD+/-R/RW/RAM Black OEM Burner

Postage is cheaper too. £1,019.90, all told in the end. My only disappointment is that they don't offer that Asus motherboard from the Aria build; that was an outstanding board.



Meanwhile Aria haven't bothered to reply to my demand for a refund. This, folks, is why you pay by credit card. We shall merely phone the card company and invoke the customer protection clauses, leaving them with the bill. They'll be after Aria with a big stick for making them lose money, however temporary.

I also found a few reviews like this. I searched for reviews before ordering from Aria; they were overall very good. Now I tried again, and found nothing but complaint after complaint, on this site and others. Seems they have been doing this to people for years.