OMG she's here!
The echo dot was pulsing at me this morning at 11:00 a.m. So I asked Alexa what her notification was, of course, I knew it was that XIX had been delivered.
I brought the box in, set it on my bed, shut down and unplugged 17, unboxed XIX and at first glance she was gorgeous. After a little bit of a panic about how the glass panel had been oriented on the case I figured it out shortly enough and commenced my hours and hours of setup. Oh what joy. Of course this isn't my first time at this rodeo, she is the 19th after all and that's just my PCs never mind all the ones I built when I ran Cozmo's and ones I set up for other people over the years. Nevertheless, technology is ever changing and I had many scratch my head moments. Thankfully no big snafus (yet) and she's up and running and looking good.
One of the challenges I had was with the hardware itself. The massive video card was dangling from its PCI slot on the motherboard in a vertical orientation. Now with 17 she also had that big Nvidia card I installed but somehow it didn't seem to dangle like this. Checked out a video on how to cure it. It suggested I buy a little doohickey from Amazon that basically would just be a support column you would shimmy under the far end of the card and hold it up. Well heck I can look around the house and find something that would do that. And sure enough I found it. To the world looking in my computer through its glass window illuminated by the pulsing rainbow RGB you'd never know that my graphics card is held straight and proud by a curtain rod bracket I had laying around. LOL! It's black and metal and works perfectly.
Another challenge is the fact that the AMD Ryzen 7 chipset apparently does not include onboard graphics so therefore both monitors need to be supplied directly through the video card. That's no problem because the way I had it with 17 kind of bothered me anyway in that I had a killer video card I paid $450 for and my second monitor was using the cheapy Intel graphics on the CPU which all articles I could read advised against but I didn't have a DisplayPort adapter so I just went with it in that configuration. So it's okay, I just have to wait on an HDMI to DisplayPort adapter that I just ordered on eBay for a couple of bucks. Should arrive in a couple days, until then, just one monitor, I guess I'll grin and bear it.
The specs on this computer are exactly as ordered except for one surprise. Instead of the 512 GB solid state drive, they gave me a one terabyte solid state drive. What?! How often is it that they give you more than what you paid for? I may not need to add that WD hard drive after all. I think I can manage with a terabyte.
I bought this last night in preparation for today. I'm going to open it as soon as I post this.
EDIT: The cork broke in the neck of the bottle of champagne and it forced me to have to "sabre" it open with my chef's knife. And, quite frankly, it tasted kinda poor for a twenty dollar bottle of champagne, glass shards not withstanding.