Had a pretty shit evening. First I lost out on that $20 rebate. Then we realized that my PC case is missing its frontal fan blades. Obviously a manufacturer's error, because the fan has a motor and wires, just no blades. I emailed them asking if they could possibly just send a replacement fan, because my computer is almost fully assembled so it would be a gigantic hassle to return the whole case at this point.
Well fuck it, whatever, my PC was now fully assembled, ready to rock. I downloaded the Windows 7 ISO and converted it to the USB format with the Microsoft tool. Plugged it in, Windows setup came on, looking good. But wait, it couldn't find my HDD. We tried and tried, but it wouldn't recognize that I had a hard drive. We Googled it, and there were several fixes, like putting the flash drive in a USB 2.0 instead of 3.0. That didn't work. Another fix where you unplug your flash drive and put it into another USB slot, no dice.
It was during that time where we also realized that my optical drive was not powering on. We plugged it into my friend's PC and it didn't work either. Looks like it's DoA. Awesome, I already threw away the box it came in. It's ok though, because my friend had a spare optical drive at another friend's house. We got it and plugged it into my PC, and immediately it made a crackling noise and smelled like it was burnt. My friend turned off my PC and we checked it out. Yep, the optical drive was completely fried. Hope his buddy won't be too mad.
We called it a night there. I don't even know what to think. Is it my PSU that fried the optical drives? The first one never smelled burnt or made a crackling noise. Everything else seems to be running smoothly. And then there's the whole Windows not finding my hard drive.
Goddamn it.
Stick with the i5 too, the i3 is starting to be stretched a bit. I'd recommend a better GPU too, 650 is pretty poor. Either go for a 7850 (with 2 free games) 
