An update on the actual day of a Fry's visit? Perish the thought!

Okay, a little background... I'm putting an HTPC in the living room. Pretty standard specs, 3000+ Athlon64, 1GB RAM, big drives, etc. The one problem is that the All-In-Wonder totally farks up the machine when I try to install the Catalyst drivers. I'm chalking it up to a crappy (Gigabyte NForce3) motherboard. I went to pick up a new card, but balked at paying way too much for a sub-par (GeForce FX 5500 PVR card) graphics card. $230 for 2 generations ago? No thank you. Also, I don't think I noticed it before, but the shelves at Fry's are DOMINATED by ATI. I run Radeons in most of my machines... but competition sparks innovation.

I also looked for separate TV cards, but they were out of the Hauppauge 250 and many others. Diamond's 550 intrigued me, esp since it came with BeyondTV and hardware MPEG2 encoding, but I passed as I have read nothing about it.

2.2GB USB drives by Emprex were only $80. Was seriously considering it, but I've heard bad things about the transfer speeds.

Also wanted to get Wipeout Pure for the PSP. Wouldn't ya know it, they were out. In fact, there were only a few games on the shelf... they looked cleaned out. Only things there: Tiger Woods, NFS, Gretzky Hockey (1 copy), and Activision's Spiderman 2. No Monkey Ball for XBox either. Doom3 XBox for $36.99 but I passed since I finished the PC version and wasn't super entertained. "Special" edition for $60.

Quick lap around a few other sections. I noticed that nearly ALL of their PCs had game demos running. Need For Speed Underground and Republic Commando seemed prominent. I wonder if this is a new push for selling their branded Fry's PCs? The Earthlink display changed as well... it was really dusty and one of the computers was missing. Classy.

400gb drives still pricey... 500gb on the way. Buffalo networking has a new end cap display with an LCD screen and some woman talking about Buffalo tech support or some such nonsense. I didn't watch it. Buffalo is probably excited I noticed it. Little do they realize I notice everything (and run on their products anyway).

Adaptec has a new Easy Media Creator 7.5. Better DivX support, which was my main complaint. I don't know if I'll upgrade.

Not much else to report... Oh, they got rid of the 'bubble wrap padding' craziness and gate near the front door, where there's a path between the return aisle and the cashier aisle. It's much more open now. No idea why. Maybe it's supposed to look better?

Total Time Spent: 35 minutes
Total Money Spent: $0
posted by Steve at 11:39 PM

Chronicles my trips to Fry's Electronics

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