po'd, and my own fault
 

So we're setting up to stream the animals from our teaching zoo to the web. Talked to ITS, ordered a machine to do it with... told them "don't care about cd/dvd reader, don't care about hard drive size, need 4gb ram and a fast CPU w/ multiple cores, must have full size tower case with at least 3 available PCI slots". Machine came in, but I was busy so I stuck it in a corner. Until this morning...

Open it up, has 2 optical drives (both DVD+- R/RW). 12gb ram (thats good but more than needed ... oh well, not my budget). Only has *one* available PCI slot. Other options are AGP slots :(. And a 1.5tb drive - about 1.45tb bigger than I need.

Hopefully the built in USB ports are on at least 3 different USB busses... but probably not. We'll see.

Lessons learned - don't let others order my stuff. Double check what is delivered as soon as it comes in.

This was the root of my fear of delegation back when I had my own business.
As the population becomes more & more unconscious, hard to trust *anyone*.

Who is John Galt?

An AGP slot in this day and age would be hard to find used. Multiple slots would not exist. Are you sure this is a new machine? Are they PCIe instead of AGP?

We once asked a staffer to order 12 computers for a classroom. We gave them very specific specs. When they arrived, there were no optical drives. When we asked the lady who ordered them, she said, "Well they said that they came with CD drives, but it wasn't on your list, so I had them take them out." We paid extra to have them removed, and had to go out and buy 12 cd drives! Ouch.