The hardware is great and easy to work with, but the default Windows installation is atrocious. It has something running that pegs disk (not CPU!) usage at 100% out of the box, rendering the machine nearly unusable, even in safe mode. Not sure how this sort of defect slipped by QA -- it's clearly software related; reformatting and installing a clean OS solved all my problems and it's running great now.

This game was purchased from Best Buy shortly after the games release for approximately $50. This is an important fact for my review as you will see later. I am what you will call a casual gamer. Since the games release I was able to get my Barbarian character up to level 19 thru the beginning of Act 2. I am not a fan of having to login to Battle.net every time I play the game. As most reviews show this is the main reason for all of the 1 star reviews. Well, on the afternoon of July 8, I received an email from Blizzard with the subject heading "Blizzard Store--Purchased Failed". You better hope to God you never get this email. Basically the email says that "since we could not fully authorize this item's purchase (they are referring to Diablo 3, the game that I purchased in Best Buy), it has now been deactivated. At first I thought this was a fraudulent email. After a couple of days I attempted to play Diablo 3, and after I logged in, I received "Error 53" which states that your account has been suspended. After creating a trouble ticket to Blizzard which I knew I was screwed since I know how these always turn out, I received a reply back stating that the game that was on my account was purchased online, and since the transaction didn't go thru, the game was removed from my account. Not only did they remove Diablo 3, but they also removed Starcraft 2 which has been on there since it came out. They wiped my entire account clean. I haven't tried to reinstall yet, but I can already bet that my authentication code no longer works. I will update this review later when I try that. Stay away from this game if you don't want this happening to you. I've sent 3 emails back on my ticket and each time they tell me that this game was purchased online.