Today, I built my dad a brand new desktop pc, his first new desktop since the summer of 2008.

He wanted to go pre-built, but I told him he’d get a lot more PC for his cash if I did the assembly and picked the parts.

So, after weeks of research and build checking, I went to Micro Center earlier today on a mission. I already had priced everything out and the tech I’ve been working with helped get everything together. Shopping went shockingly smoothly, and that tech/salesdude very much so earned his commission.

Assembly, hardware wise, went smoothly as well. Motherboard was easy to install, CPU went in smoothly, fan and heatsink installation took only a few minutes, and all the wiring was clearly marked and labeled. So far, so good.

Once everything was bolted and screwed and wired into place, it was time to fire the beast up, just for confirmation.

Post and BIOS, first try, no issues, everything working. Never happened before, but I’m not complaining (at least about this).

The drama begins when we get to the software. Back in 2009 or so, my dad bought a 3 pack Windows 7 upgrade license for Home Premium. He’s never built a machine from scratch, always going OEM, so you may notice, we’ve not bought a pure install (non-upgrade) license of Windows since 98SE. Nearly TWENTY years ago.

And, of course, the upgrade disc didn’t work correctly, because I didn’t have anything installed on this machine. Fantastic. I don’t have any other working clean install discs lying around, so in order to set up this new machine, I had to go pirate a Windows Vista install disc, install Vista, and THEN install a clean Windows 7. This took about three hours longer than I have patience for, and when everything booted, I was eager to get this fucker finished.

But wait! Why should things go smoothly? Drivers install as expected, but even when connected to wifi and running normally, Windows Update refuses to do a goddamn single iota of a thing. Installing SP1, hoping it fixes the issue.

Shit, Microsoft, get it together.