A screw loose?

This financial year's technology refresh has just got under way and yet another HP ProLiant bargain has made it on to my list. The ML115 G5 comes with a 160GB HDD, 512MB PC2-6400 RAM, SATA DVD rewriter and AMD Opteron 1214 dual core 64 bit processor, all for the princely sum of £94.61 before VAT (£111.17 including). The LO100c remote management card costs £112.99 (£132.76 including VAT), more than the server itself and so tiny it physically hurts me (a Yorkshireman!) to part with so much brass for it.

Like the other ML1xx servers the case is designed to accommodate four 3.5" HDDs and two 5¼" drives and, pleasantly, there are enough power connectors to cater for any combination of Molex or SATA devices. The six SATA channel G5 servers have no IDE channel (the ML110G4s, ML115G1s had four SATA and two IDE) and only one PCI slot, although they do have three (x1, x8 and x16) PCI-E slots (the G4s, G1s have two PCI and two x8 PCI-E). Extra memory is cheap as chips at the moment and this box doesn't need any more disk for its designated role.

Now, perhaps I'm taking this a little out of perspective but my server arrived quite incomplete. In the case there are, as usual, twelve screws for three additional 3.5" HDDs and four for an additional 5¼" device but where's the screw to hold the LO100c in place?!? I even had to suffer the ignominy of having to snap the pressed steel cover out of the way to install the card, presumably left in place to save the cost of the blank and screw that are to be found on the G1, and curiously the ML110 G5, variety. Obviously, I had a spare in my box of tricks but clearly that's not the point. I sincerely hope this is not the start of some slippery slope that will result in HP kit being just as poor as its main competitors. ;-)