I'm not sure how many people on my friends list are computer savvy, but there has to be a couple. At least Mish works at Best Buy, so she should have a little insight. ;)
Anyway, I confess that while I'm pretty damn good at computer troubleshooting, I'm a relative noob when it comes to hardware. I know how to update RAM and video cards and put in new drives and all that, but all the specs and numbers and blah blee bloo don't mean much to me. I really should invest some time in figuring it out what it all means, but I haven't had the drive to yet. (Drive lol).
Andrew really wants to get a better gaming desktop. Now, in my opinion, my desktop is fine. It's about three years old, which isn't that ancient, I don't think, it's been upgraded several times with a bigger hard drive and more RAM and a better video card (though I guess the card itself was considered low-end, but it was better than the one that was in there, for sure). I don't have much desire to replace my laptop because it functions just fine as well, and does what I need it to do. After I upgraded the RAM in it, it ran super fast, even with clunky Vista (booo Microsoft boooo). But I'm more looking at my desktop. I see all these fancy schmancy new shiny things out that makes me ooo and ahh like they're supposed to, but these days, if you have half a brain, is it easier/cheaper to just upgrade/build rather than buy new?
The reason I'm asking this is that despite meeting WAY over the minimum specs for the game, The Sims 3 runs like a slug on it. I honestly haven't played WoW on it in months so I'm installing 45 years worth of patches so I can test and see how THAT runs, because since the last time I ran it I added 2 gb of RAM and a new video card. So, really, this computer SHOULD RUN THE SIMS AND IT DOESN'T. I mean, it does, but it takes a lifetime for them to sleep and it's jumpy and just not that much fun. For what it's worth, the compy is an HP Pavilion Media Center PC running Windows XP with SP3, 2.8 Ghz Pentium D with 4 Gb of RAM. Video card is a NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT, 512 MB display memory. 140Gb Hard drive (which is so tiny these days, haha, but I really don't need more than that!). Anyone got any suggestions? Bueller? Bueller?
On that note, out of curiosity, how often do you guys replace or upgrade your computers?
