While I am the Troll Man, and not the Hater, but I cannot go longer without saying this.

My computer is now about five years old, and probably gives me more annoyance than my mom. I bought it with really one thing in mind, playing Guild Wars. It was going to be the best computer ever, with the ability to run everything. I'll let you drool over the specs for a second:
-Windows XP, media center addition.
-1GB of Ram
-AMD Athalon 64 Processor.
-Generic integrated video card (I did buy another overpriced one from Best Buy to help my graphics out some.)

At the time, that was my idea of it, that it would last me through college and beyond, that it would never go obsolete.


The first day I bought my computer home from Best Buy, ripped off all the environment-destroying packaging, and set it up was the happiest day of my life. It was also the beginning of a long trip. That very first day, the computer locked up on me. I should have taken it as a sign, but my old computer (which was complete garbage from the beginning) did it daily, and I didn't think much of it as I pushed the power button.

Around two months later, after it crashed on me, it tried rebooting it. I pressed the power button, and it just kind of sat there. The lights were on, but nobody was at home. I had it sent in, and after waiting for two excruciating weeks, I got it back, along with a notice saying they had replaced the faulty (for whatever reason) motherboard, and that it was good as new. Two months later, the same thing happened. After much rage and more waiting, the motherboard was replaced again, which has actually stayed intact till this day.

Moving to today, the computer bought specifically for Guild Wars barely runs it, along with pretty much every other game- even at the lowest settings. Think trying to play Halo on the N64. I can probably think through a couple reasons why it doesn't work as fast as it should. Maybe it's because I used to leave it on for weeks at a time, without rebooting or closing anything. My Guild Wars account got tons of play time wracked up, but now my computer runs like a paraplegic through tar.

Trying to upgrade it was an adventure. I opened up the case a while ago for probably the first time in several months to find that my 1GB of ram was made up of two 512MB ram cards, DDR1 no less. Thank you Compaq, and your immaculate standards for building computers. Long story short, I've decided to buy a new computer, with around 4x better specs, but for half of what I paid for this one...