It is not Sunday but I have a confession to make. I have a weakness.
If we are being honest, its probably fair to say that we all have weaknesses. The Republican mayor of Spokane cant seem to stop himself from soliciting minors for sex in gay chat rooms. Me? I cant keep myself away from sweets and I spend way too much money on computers.
In the living room, we have a custom built HDTV/TIVO monstrosity that drives me nuts but I cant seem to live without. In my office (soon to be the baby's office), I have my pride and joy - a fancy game PC.
I build my own PC's so I make incremental changes regularly. I get a new graphics card about once a year and I make larger changes every few years or so. I dont know if its the weather or hormones or what, but most of the time i dont think about it at all and then something just clicks and, I cant stop myself from buying new game stuff. Just think of all the cool graphics Im missing with that old hardware!! Argh, I cant take it!
Im excited to get a new dual-core Intel Mac and run Windows stuff on it. It may work fine for my turn-based strategy games but it's just not going to cut if as a real game machine. A top-notch game machine is still a beast to behold and a labor of love.
It has been two years since I did a major upgrade. In that time Vista still has not shipped but hardware has changed immensely. CPU's are now 64 bit and dual core. The AGP bus has disappeared and been replaced with PCI-X, I think even the second version of PCI-express. Graphics cards today are twice as powerful as they were two years ago and the state of the art is TWO cards at once.
The results? You wont see it in strategy games but First-Person games like Everquest2 or Half-Life:Source are amazing. Computer games really are starting to look like interactive movies. And I spend a hell of a lot more quality time playing games than I do watching movies.
With the baby due any day now, Angela is probably right that I wont have time to enjoy a new PC let alone put it together. (Building Windows-PC's is still an exercise in hair loss and cursing like a pirate.) But I still want to. Instead of homework, I find myself shopping (you wouldn't believe how much research it takes).
Can I hold out? The mind is firm but the body is oh so weak :(
