"All I would like now is an SSD, a newer video card, Windows 7 64-bit, some more RAM..."

Guest Writer James "Ajay" Russell reminisces about his PC upgrades, both minor and major.

http://www.simhq.com/_technology3/technology_183a.html

Nice work, Ajay! Lots of episodes and many of us can relate to. Er, except for the hammer. I hope! :-)

...and a triple monitor setup, and a quality flight yoke, and a better chair, and... The list never ends!

Well done, Ajay!

Not sure how to get in touch with Ajay but, the 64-bit Win7 part is free! If he just installs a 64-bit version of Win7 from a friend or whoever, he can use his "32-bit" CD key and use it perfectly fine. The CD key is for Home-Premium or Ultimate or Professional, NOT specifically a 32 or 64 bit version. Hope that solves at least one problem! =)

Great job Ajay...loved every bit of that article!

Nicely done Ajay!

My upgrade path through the years has always just been my mouse-mat, and I hate throwing stuff away. When 5 1/4 floppies make a comeback then I'll be laughing all the way to the bank!

I'm one of those who threw in the towel on the pixel chase, but I can so readily identify with the author.

I built all my own machines from about 2000-2009. After that I went store-bought because it just wasn't worth all the extra effort to me, but I'm happy for those that do. Without them, the progress of technology wouldn't happen and we'd all be using Pentium 3's.

http://www.simhq.com/_technology2/technology_083a.html (My version of how it all went down...)

Great work!

Video game addiction. All I can say.

Love the article.. I feel your pain.. I'm listening to my 2008 build machine grinding away right now (just how much cat hair CAN a motherboard take..??) and know I'm not far from having to do the upgrade dance.

Hard to believe it is already four years old!

The Build

Enjoyed reading your take.. Blunt objects.. LOL..

BeachAV8R

Nicely written article.

To this day I sit with a knot in my stomach after replacing RAM and cards etc. That tense minute where you power on and pray it will all work as it should!

I remember my Mum bringing EAW back from England for me. It was a repeat of the above scenario. Installing it and then praying it would work. I haven't played it in a very long time but I can still feel the elation of seeing those Mustangs lining up and taking off for the very first time.

Cheers guys and thanks Doug actually..i take that back, i blame SimHQ for my pc journey! if i never stumbled in here i would have a fatter wallet and non bloodshot eyes ! ..and pray you never have to go through the Hammer Vs Card scenario, the card is a severe underachiever in this category, even in sli mode !

Really though, besides that, its been good times and 90 % of what i have learnt about what goes on in that magical little box is from here.

Great read, thanks ajay. I can relate to the hammer incident, as it happens :-)

Great article, nice reading. Thanks!

Great article, we have all been there with our various rigs, cupboards full of once prized bleeding edge tech that now gathers dust and that feeling of dread when you boot up a game like crysis for the first time and hoping to all that is holy that it will run on max smoothly! For me its as much about the PC and putting it all together as it is about the games.

Nice article Ajay. I think a lot of people here have been on a similar journey. I for one can't see myself ever buying an off the shelf PC again, and I like you built up my confidence one little victory (upgrade!) at a time. Glad to see that your keyboard is going stong after a few years as well as my 'Cyborg V5' looks identical to yours! My next upgrade has to be a better HOTAS set-up and I'm looking around at my next opportunity to splash my (as yet nonexistant) cash..

My first PC was a IBM 286 or IBM/AT, with 3 or 4 colors, and a few MB of RAM
I played Falcon on it (Falcon AT?) This One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rijiL8XfaVo

From there a Packard Bell 486DX2, 16MB of Ram (trident 9680 PCI 1MB Ram Direct Draw GFX),
Then Intel 200MHz MMX, 32MB of RAM (Same GFX Card),
Then AMD 400MHz K6II 64MB of Ram (3dFX Voodoo 3/2000 PCI w/ 16MB VRAM),
Then 750 Athlon w/ 128MB of RAM, and ATI All in Wonder Radeon (7200 I think w/ 32 mb of Ram)
Then upgraded that System to a 1.1Ghz Athlon and two 256MB sticks (512mb total), then to two 512 MB sticks (1GB Total) then added the 256 sticks back to make it 1.5GB total), Then Upgraded to a Ati All In Wonder 9600XT (128MB)

Then Built an Athlon64 1.8Ghz, 768 MB of Ram, Geforce 4 MM 440 GPU
Then Sempron 2.2Ghz, 1 GB of Ram, ATI AIW 9600XT

Then Athlon II 3.0Ghz, 2GB of RAM, 8800GTS 640mb


then Phenom II 3Ghz, 4GB of Ram ATI 5830, which was replaced with a AMD6850 under RMA.

then FX-8120. with 16GB of Ram, w/ AMD7950 3GB

I remember coming out of one of those PC conventions with 2x512MB Dimms, and rushing home to install and go on the PC irc channel and flash them with my /systeminfo script, as 1GB of Ram in 2001 was A LOT. Now i Have 16GB.

The 9600xt was a damn good card i thought, heaps of grunt for a good price

Great article Ajay! I laughed, I cried.

Good job man, well written too.

Nice read.

I think there have to be a few who share that crushed feeling when you realise that the $400 upgrade you made doesn't resolve the problem with the one game you were hoping it would...

Are Il-2/Clod and Crysis really the only games you've been playing?

I dabbled in a few others..V8 supercars, BoB WoV, Lomac and Flaming cliffs, Tom Clancys Rainbow six Vegas and Ghost Recon..one of the Medal of Honours and Hearts of Iron II. Black Shark is sitting in the cupboard awaiting a moment when i feel like putting the time into it. Black Ops got a run but online was a kiddie fest plus crap small maps and offline i never finished after about halfway through.The original Call of Duty and United Offensive sucked me in for a while as it was my first Clan type thing and we were pretty serious about our matches for about 6 months.

The il2 series took up most of my gaming time over the years though and i went pretty hardcore online with it for a while there, plus mucking around with the FMB. Crysis would have been the main FPS type as i played it through with a couple of mates and again with a certain lady , as well as part 2, we would go death for death and see how far we could get through per life. Was cool playing it and mainly focusing on trying not to die.Many nights and much alcohol was consumed

Latest Arma version is on the cards soon , will need to get up to speed with the controls and such. I tried the original years ago but it was a crashy bug fest unfortunately.

Atm the only games i have installed are il2 4.11m plus and a modded version, i connect and fly with my son who loves it which is cool as. We have Waterplane river races and bridge to bridge races lol. CloD..wheres the flippin paaaaatch !! Crysis 2 , my 9 year old girl loves getting scared by it when the aliens come out . Open General which i may get some games going with a couple of guys here.

I spend more time on here mucking around with a tablet drawing and doing arty farty stuff than gaming the past year or so.

But yeah..in answer to your question, those three games plus EAW and HOI would have had the most pc time since i have had a pc.

Sorry for the dribble

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.

Great article Ajay. like the other posters, I can relate to a lot of what was written there. I am currently in the process of an upgrade after my graphics card died and cant wait to see what windows 7 64bit will be like! Isn't it funny how most of us turn the adversity of a computer breakdown into the opportunity to do a computer upgrade?

Win7 64 ..me either stewart

and Darren ..don'y worry..we knocked Hitler and his crew off remember

Thomas Edison has some good quotes i think ..

When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this - you haven't.

Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

I know you mentioned it, but it's a shame you haven't tried Rise of Flight. I love ww2 era, and wondered if I could get sucked into ww1 kites as much, but put simply, it is the best flight sim I've ever played. And like you, I've put more hours into IL2 than into most other things, so it's not a glib statement. The best thing is that you don't even need a monster rig to play it.. mine is going on 3 yrs and happily lets RoF run at normal detail levels (but with quite nice water!)

Spiffy, you have the most betterest awesomenest name in a forum I've ever seen.

Great read Ajay!

I could relate to a lot of your experiences.

Its funny how so many get technical skills just from wanting to play the next best thing on PC so much so that you go from knowing nothing about whats inside "the box" to being technically competent and up on all the latest technology.

I've also had one of those hammer incidents (and pending divorce) and still have the case (my server) with the dings to prove it!

Cheers,
5

Maybe we need a 'Hammered Anonymous ' or something group..seems to be a few of us I dont think i will ever get rid of the old sidewinder case that will not latch properly..we have grown quite close over the years and i think it has forgiven for the many months of solitude i forced it into all those years back

Cool read Ajay. I was an EAW fanatic until the dreaded 7217 error ended my playing days with it a few years back. Trying to find a fix for EAW is how I stumbled across IL-2 at the old Airwarfare site. It was another WWII flying sim and looked pretty good so I went out and bought Pacific Fighters, which was the most recent version at that time, hoping to be able to make it work on my system. It didn't work all that great but at least it loaded, unlike EAW anymore, and let me make my own simple missions using the FMB. There are still some things I liked better about EAW but overall IL-2 still keeps me pretty happy.


Wheels