Although I have always been a heavy PC Gamer, I haven't went through many gfx cards:

nvidia Riva TNT
Geforce 4200Ti
Geforce 8800GT

It's kind of a game for me to get the most out of a system.
I easily have the money to build a 1500€ rig right now, but I still plan on hanging on as long as possible.

I loved this line: I think I opened it twice whilst stopped at traffic lights on the way home just to perve on it.

Great article!

That was a fun read, with which anyone interested in PC gaming can relate intimately. Thanks Ajay, both for sharing your experiences as well as helping me to remember my own trials and tribulations chasing the elusive pixel.

<--- Chasing pixels since 1992

Random memories:

• Anyone remember manually adding 16kb memory chips -don't bend a peg!!- to an expanded memory card?? It took me two months to fill that dang card up with chips. But each time I booted the MS-DOS operating system I giggled just a bit when the autoexec.bat file loaded the expanded memory drivers and counted down how much extra it had available to use...
  
  My first hard drive cost me over $200 and was a massive 20 megabytes. Salesman: "It will take you years to fill that up!" LOL! FAIL! It took less than three months.
  
  Sound = AdLib. The first time I plugged in a brand new AdLib sound card and connected the output jack to my (relocated to the man-cave) home stereo... WOW! Red Baron multiplayer (over a 2400baud modem) with engine and machine gun sounds that kept my wife awake at nights while I flew with the left-coast boys until the wee hours.
  
  That first home-built machine: an Intel 386-16mhz processor was my first hand-rolled rig. The next one was a 386-40, then a couple 486 machines, then I was building them for profit with parts purchased from the computer hardware shows that regularly came through Virginia.
  
  My absolute disgust at having to buy a Dell. My latest home-grown machine had died an early death after capacitors started bulging and leaking on the mobo. The Dells were cheap and shipped quickly. I discovered that the thing was built to last however, and after numerous component upgrades it just kept purring along. Years passed. I bought Dells for my wife and daughter. Both of those laptops are still running and in use today. My Dell desktop got relegated to file server duties after I got the itch and built my current rig: i7 2600K, 16gb RAM, over 3tb of hard drive space, two SSD drives (one for the OS - Win7 Pro 64bit, and the other for FSX) and many other pixel-chasing components.

And so it goes...

Install HL2 as well - I was playing the two around the same time, a peak in my gaming experience.

Thank you for this article I found so much of my own flying sims experiences in your writing, right now I running a machine that is four years old but I am desperate to get a new machine.... My wife has not destroyed my box yet she believes that a man should have something to drop pixel bombs on.


VIKBELL

Been a PC gamer since 2001, now let's see...

Intel Pentium III 1.0Ghz, 128MB SDRAM(Upgraded to 256MB around 2003), Nvidia TNT2 with 32MB of VRAM and 40GB of hard drive space, decommissioned at 2004, used to run some light weight sims like Micro Flight quite nicely with a 15" LCD screen -- That thing's expensive back then.

Intel Pentium IV 2.93Ghz, 1GB DDR SDRAM, Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 with 128MB DDR SDRAM and 80GB worth of secondary data storage. Still sitting under my table with a relatively new ATI Radeon 3650 on the AGP slot of the old FX 5200, a standalone sound card, an additional 160GB hard drive, and a shinier heatsink on the processor in a major overhaul back around 2008.

Inter Core 2 T9300 2.50Ghz, 2GB DDR2(4GB after 2009), Nvidia GeForce 8600M and 256MB of GDDR3, 200GB of hard drive space and a free heater in winter, in my current, yet (I know) outdated, XPS laptop. Runs things like Freefalcon and FSX fine with a Saitek stick, and SAM Simulator on a Windows XP VM with the necessary resolution.

Nice read!

Ajay! That was an awesome article! Sorry to hear abt the hammer incident. bet u r not!

I guess everyone has there love story with their PCs and its upkeep. Like your IL2 mine was Lock On:Modern air combat. All through college I used to track it development. Finally when it came out i had no option of getting the game (being in India). I finally got the CD through a friend in US. However, I was unable to play it on any of the machine around me. I was devastated. I had promised myself the with the first salary(s) that i get from job I would buy a comp. And that wish came true in 2008. 6 years after the game came out.

Of course i was not to sad as I was also a Falcon addict and it seemed to play on any system.

Today I guess Family priorities stall me from upgrading to the perfect machine. But I still manage.

Cheers

kaRadi

Great article!

It almost seems like getting screwed on the purchase of the first rig is a PC gamer's rite of passage.

I bought my first rig off the local equivalent of Craig's list specifically for IL2 which I bought without a computer to run it on. I asked the seller why his basement apartment was so cold and he told me the landlord hadn't put the heat on... needless to say it had some stability issues. Diagnosing that rig was an education in PC-building as stability issues plagued me for the first three weeks. Eventually I figured out that the main culprit was a crappy PSU that just wasn't putting out consistent voltage on the rails; once I got that fixed, added more RAM and upgraded the GPU it was a decent machine

I followed this transition almost exactly... my first PC was a throbbing 166MMX (I capitalize MMX because it was AMAZING back in the days.) I didn't even get a 33.6 modem in it... and it was still 2400 without a monitor. I don't remember how much ram- but suffice to say it wasn't much by today's standards.


Now, with a frugal appettite the same cost nets me an I7 2600k, 8 gigs of RAM, a GTX 580, an SSD etc.

But- that 2400 was an investment into PCs... and building... and an appreciation for how fricken easy it is now. No needing to kid glove the RAM... easy access to the required software...

Yeah... this is the good life.

Everyone bloke or lass for that matter loves flying.It's just the brainy ones get the privelage before others.

Because flying takes a LOVE of MATH.

Flying is all about math.The stupid VOR ,the stupid DME the stupid HSI.

All over complicated instruments that need a brain like Einstein to work out.


Then you have to contend with safety stuff(memory).

I'd loveto be a pilot but it's really for the 5 percent of us.
THose who were born wit hthe lucky gift of brains.
I didn't get them and suffer from depression to boot and an eye disease.

I'm so jealous of all those brainy pricks that get ahead in life while we suffer.

In the future people like me will be stamped ,because the World will be overpopulated and we will be killed by injection after a test.