The Build

I have been working for the last several weeks on restoring my old desktop.  By restore, of course I mean that I totally gutted it and replaced everything in an attempt to bring it out of the year 2001.  Yes, this computer is old, so old that it took considerably more effort than I originally anticipated to get it to play nice with the new parts.

For all the frustration of trying to get everything put together and working, it was actually kind of fun.  I daresay, it's a kind of fun that will match the fun I will experience being able to play the latest PC games on it.  This was an real eye-opener, an experience that has taught me a lot about the tech hobby surrounding PC gaming.

I used to not understand PC gamers, always talking about "graphics" this and "polygons" that:  a few megabytes here, and a few gigabytes there, and maybe a few terabytes thrown in for good measure.  I grew up with a computer that couldn't even run N64 ROM's, so all of this was totally off my radar, until now.

Now that I have seen what lies between the side panels, taken it out, and replaced it with updated parts, I can really appreciated what PC gamers see in all of this.  It's rather like how motorheads will talk about the new spark plugs or catalytic converters or whatever they got.  The same level of pride applies to PC enthusiasts talking about their new video cards or sound cards or RAM chips.

There are a few gaming experiences that are still exclusive to the PC, and there is a feel to playing with the keyboard and mouse that cannot be replicated with the controller.  At it's core, though, PC gaming is a tech hobby, plain and simple.  Souping up my 10-year-old computer has taught me that, and has given me a proper induction into the hobby.