Way to waste a weekend. And then some.

One thing I admired about my Dad in a weird sort of way was his unspeakable cheapness.  
He could pinch a penny so hard, Lincoln would scream and try to bite his finger.

He'd drag people's televisions off their lawns on garbage day, fix them and litter the house with the good ones.
He'd make sure you ate every bite of your meat and gnawed on the gristle before you got another piece.
He'd bargain and haggle over things out of Tradin' Times and the newspaper ads and Snickers bars at the grocery checkout
He fixed our washer and dryer so many times, the Appliance Reaper came by, knocked on the door and said, "Dood!  Really!  They WANN A come with me."  So of course, he found a perfectly good one--you guessed it--on somebody else's lawn.

Then one day he realized, "Hey!  I got money!" so he sold his house, moved out the hood, got another on a golf course with a guest bathroom bigger than the bedroom my brother and I grew up in and put a white baby grand piano in his living room.  I was never more disappointed in him.

But when am I gonna learn that I'm not all that handy? 
Cheap?  Oh, yeah.  Handy?  Not so much.

Sometimes pinching pennies is just.  plain DUMB.

Like when $300 will buy you a ready-made, already configured, pull me out the box, plug me in cheap PC at Wally World but noooooooooooooooooo.   I gotta get up in the morning instead , drive 10 miles past Wally World, stand out in a slow line out in the sun for an hour to buy at an open-box PARTS sale for essentially the same damned PC.  Oh, except without an OS.  Or tech support. For a savings of?  Ready for this?  Timpani, please?  

About $50.

Sure, some parts are a little different.  My choice includes a gig of ram instead of 256MB and a pair of 80 GB SATA drives striped in a RAID instead ot only one.  On the other hand?  Not only did the system in a box already have Windows, already include another DVD burner and a better onboard video subsystem I WOULDN'T HAVE SPENT TIME ON IT.  

If I spend more than an hour-and-a-half on it, I've already lost what they would have paid me to come to work and sit at my desk instead.  But?  But?  The first motherboard had wonky video problems.  Of course, without support I have to take it apart and reassemble it myself.  So that took most of Saturday night grappling with the problems that aren't mine and three hours in the store Sunday fixing them and way too much of last night trying to get the RAID to work with my antiquated copy of XP.  (BTW, anybody know where I can get a copy at a very, very reasonable price?)

Somebody remind me of this next time I talk about upgrading anything.  Stop me.  Slap me.  Break my fingers.  Do what you must.

GAH.