Well, I got _The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion_ for PC, on release day, and I’ve been playing it pretty steadily since. I’ve logged more than a few hours, gotten my character up to 9th level, and completed a wide sampling of quests. I must say, this game is living up to my expectations in every way. There’s a real sense that this is a living world, and the quests, so far, have all been very well thought-out. Even my impulsive sessions with random dungeons have been pretty memorable. I won’t go through and give you a features list, or tell you what’s good about it and what isn’t; the gaming press has pretty much covered that by now. Instead, I’ll just tell you to buy this game. If you’ve got a powerful enough PC, get it for PC. If you’ve got an Xbox 360, get it for that system. If you’ve got neither, your cheapest option is probably to get the 360 version, along with the console, itself. At any rate, if you like computer role-playing games at all, or have liked _Elder Scrolls_ games in the past, you absolutely owe it to yourself to get this game and play the hell out of it. Seriously.

I’m not too happy with Dell at the moment. I’m still working with a faulty laptop, even though my replacement was supposed to arrive last Friday. Apparently, the replacement is still being built (it’s been in the build stage for more than a week now), because something is holding it up. Nobody at Dell can seem to tell me what’s holding it up, though, or when I’ll ever see it. Anyway, I’m grumpy about that.

At least I can still play games on my faulty laptop, though. Oh, and I got _Oblivion_ yesterday, which is fantastic so far, so that’s taking the edge off. Anyway.

Alright, so on Monday, I got my new Dell laptop. It was everything I expected it to be, with one exception: something was seriously wrong with the wifi card. So wrong, in fact, that my laptop, my brand new laptop, regularly locked up when I had the card turned on. So, hoping to iron out this issue with a minimum of fuss, I called Dell tech support, and proceeded to spend a combined total of about six hours on the phone with them over the course of two days. It sucked, and ultimately turned out to be a complete waste of time. This wasn’t necessarly Dell’s fault; or, at least, it wasn’t Dell tech support’s fault. As it turns out, Dell seems to have shipped me a laptop with a faulty wifi card that crashes the system when used. Not the kind of thing that can be fixed over the phone.

Anyway, I called Dell customer service yesterday, and they were very quick to tell me that they could send me a brand new, replacement laptop with the same hardware configuration, free of charge, as well as a method of sending the faulty laptop back once I got the new one (again, free of charge). I’ve since been called by Dell twice, once to confirm that I had actually requested a new laptop, and again to let me know that my new laptop was being processed, and to give me an order number. I’ve also been told that, once the computer is assembled and tested, the will overnight it to me. Not bad.

At any rate, while I was pretty peeved (and still am) about having gotten a faulty laptop in the first place, I am quite pleased with the way they’re resolving the issue for me. Of course, a big fat wad of cash to boot would be nice, but you can’t have everything, right?

I’m still using the old rig, cobbled together from pieces of better machines. However, I’ve got a brand new laptop coming to me from Dell, so I’ll be back in fighting form in no time. I’ll post again when I have my new toy.