I can tell you from personal experience that you will have little to anything to worry about with regards to theft of another's belonging... depending on the size of your town, most of the gamers will all know each other, in fact, there will probably only be 2-3 major groups of friends that will come...
On the other hand, while you're not worried about theft of property, I can relay to you a personal story here:
My computer repair shop in SE Missouri used to have LAN parties ALL the time... at least every month or two... the biggest problem we found? We would accidentally leave sales information (companies we were going to contact, sales leads, etc)... apprently, we had several individuals who were coming over, going through that information when no one was looking and then telling their employer or their their friends who owned a competeing computer repair business...
It's hard to walk out with physical items that don't belong to you, but it's very easy to walk out with information...
I think you're absolutely right... as far as our store is concerned, we advertise very publically that we have not and will not sell Vista... until they absolutely MAKE us.
In fact, Missouri just had the back-to-school, tax free weekend and every Dell laptop we sold came with XP Pro. Yeah, extra money to the customer, but they were happy to pay an extra $150 to get it instead of Vista...
maybe that's Microsoft's intention? Now, everyone who would spend $100 on XP Home is spending $100 on Vista Home AND an extra $150 upgrading to Business so they can 'downgrade' to XP Pro??
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Actually, I'm a Mason and I can tell you the goat seemed pretty happy about it... it's the gerbil that was a little pissed.
I can tell you from personal experience that you will have little to anything to worry about with regards to theft of another's belonging... depending on the size of your town, most of the gamers will all know each other, in fact, there will probably only be 2-3 major groups of friends that will come... On the other hand, while you're not worried about theft of property, I can relay to you a personal story here: My computer repair shop in SE Missouri used to have LAN parties ALL the time... at least every month or two... the biggest problem we found? We would accidentally leave sales information (companies we were going to contact, sales leads, etc)... apprently, we had several individuals who were coming over, going through that information when no one was looking and then telling their employer or their their friends who owned a competeing computer repair business... It's hard to walk out with physical items that don't belong to you, but it's very easy to walk out with information...
I think you're absolutely right... as far as our store is concerned, we advertise very publically that we have not and will not sell Vista... until they absolutely MAKE us. In fact, Missouri just had the back-to-school, tax free weekend and every Dell laptop we sold came with XP Pro. Yeah, extra money to the customer, but they were happy to pay an extra $150 to get it instead of Vista... maybe that's Microsoft's intention? Now, everyone who would spend $100 on XP Home is spending $100 on Vista Home AND an extra $150 upgrading to Business so they can 'downgrade' to XP Pro??