It's currently 3:38 a.m. on Thursday morning here in Seoul. I'm sitting in a computer room, inhaling mass quantities of second hand smoke, and waiting for a friend to get back to MSN from his lunch break. Why, you ask? What could be so important to have me up at nearly 4 when I have to be up in 5 hours?

I'm trying to buy a computer. It's been on my list of "adult" purchases for a year and a half now, and I'm finally ready to get it. Mostly because I've finished paying off the first two post-university credit binges, partly because I can no longer stand the stench of cigarettes in the computer rooms here (how did all of you put up with me back in the day????). So I'm interested in the Dell Inspiron 8500. It's really quite pretty. However, I'm not entirely comfortable selecting all of my upgrades at this moment. For example, how is a moron like me to know whether it is better to upgrade to a better display or a better video card? Is one useless without the other? And do I need the Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 processor at 2.40GHz-M, or will I be allright with 2.20? These questions need answers. And they need them before 10:00 p.m. Eastern today if I'm going to take advantage of the limited time free upgrade to a CD/DVD burner. Why is it that I'm destined to make every major decision at the last possible minute? I suppose it's actually unlikely that I'll get the free upgrade even if my advisor arrives soon, as Dell didn't seem to believe that my SIN was valid. They said they'll email me within 48 hours in response to my application, but that will be long past 10 p.m. Eastern, even with that cunning little international dateline. Alas, how much extra can a CD/DVD burner actually cost?

For any of you who are actually in the know, here are the questions I need answered before I finalize my purchase details:

1. the bit about the processor.

2. XGA, Super XGA+ (add $77), or Ultra XGA (add $200)?

3. 32MB DDR ATI MOBILITY RADEON 9000 4x AGP 3D Video or
64MB DDR NVIDIA GeForce 4 4200 Go AGP 4X Graphics (add $149)

4. 1300 WLAN (802.11b/g, 54Mbps) miniPCI Card (add $99) or
1400 DualBand WLAN (802.11a/b/g, 54Mbps) miniPCI Card (add $149)

It's really all beyond me.