BlameThePixel!

A pretty decent system there, although maybe invest in a new card sometime after Christmas...

Meh. I'm happy with it. Anything is better than my crappy ATI 7200 .

Bad luck. What did the lightning fry inside you computer?

There have been two occasions where lightning has struck my computer. THe first time I was none the wiser and had everything directly wired into unprotected sockets.

Bang.

THe second time I had wired everything into nice brand new expensive surge protectors (at my dad's expense). The internet cable broke and so I couldnt wire the internet through the surge protector otherwise it wouldnt reach. So I didnt. Lightning struck, went through the internet cable, though (yet did not fry) my external modem and bust up the motherboard.

Story of my life. Anyway, I cannot recommend anything to you since everything I ever bought was crap or had crap service except my laptop which was HP.

The hard drive completely died, and I'm convinced it did something to the processor as well (I tried my old, OLD harddrive and it took longer for it to boot up than it did in the old computer it came out of).

Is that normal? It should either be the same speed as before or faster shouldn't it?

Yes, lightning damage really speeds those processors up, yipee kay-ai!

....makes sense. More power=stuff done faster no?

YES *bumps up vcore voltage by 8V*

Eventually your power has to hit its head on the ceiling. I know there's unexplored potential out there, but still...

Yes. I think I will wire my computer to a fifty foor ariel that I will install on top of my house. Soon I will have unlimited power and you guys will be at my mercy

Ooooh..cost?

It comes out to be about $1160. It's a prebuilt PC on TigerDirect, made by Systemax.

I hate pre-built PC's, my PC was bought and built myself part-by-part

Well, $1000 isn't bad for what he's got. Unless it's like a 200ms response time monitor and really laggy RAM and HDD.

A few addendums for those keeping score at home:

1) The processor, isn't a processor, it's a dual processor. Didn't even find that out until the thing showed up on my doorstep this afternoon.

2) The graphics card, was ordered separately from the computer (meaning I DID have to install it myself). But, lo and behold, my computer doesn't have an AGP card slot. So, we're sending it back, and getting a PCI Express card! Score!