Geek @ <3

I've been a geek all my life. I love gadgets and technology. With my humble existence throughout my adolescent years I could only read with amazement about the new consumer electronics that were on the market. I wasn't able to buy a computer for myself till I was well out of high school. It was an economy machine that I purchased at Fry's Electronics. The specs were bottom basement stuff even for the time, 500 MHz processor, onboard sound; I believe the motherboard only supported about 512MB of RAM. My buddy Rye gave an old Invidia Vanta TNT2 32MB video card.

This machine was what led to my introduction to online gaming. Rye and I would team up or battle each other in Rogue Spear Rainbow Six. This game is what really got me hooked on first person shooters. Yes, I had played Wolfensten and the Doom series but Rogue Spear was the first to place some merit on reality.

Unfortunately, that old 500 MHz machine wasn't up to the task of playing Rogue Spear online with serious gamers. The onboard sound worked intermittently at best. The Vanta couldn't keep up with game play. Ghosting was hellatious. There were a few instances playing against Rye that were hilarious because the ghosting was just that bad. One minute he's in front of me about to die. Then, he's behind me. Basically, the game was progressing but I couldn't see what was happening. This was completely unacceptable.

This circumstance is what lead to my first foray into upgrading/modding a computer. I saved up enough to purchase a new motherboard/cpu combo. I can't remember what motherboard was in the bundle but I do know the processor was an 800mhz AMD Duron. The Duron was the budget processor in AMD's lineup at the time. I pulled out the old motherboard and 500mhz processor. In went the new.

This configuration was a great improvement of over the old but, hardly up to par. I could now here the sounds of the game. The ghosting wasn't nearly as bad but the game play was still slow when playing online against several players. The cycle of save and upgrade had begun.

Over the years I've been through a number of different computer configurations. After the Duron I assembled a duel Intel P3 system based on an Iwill DVD-R 266 motherboard. Now, this was a great improvement over the Duron but proved to be unstable. I later found out that it wasn't the motherboard itself but, faulty capacitors that had made it to the market. A number of motherboard manufacturers had a problem with this. I eventually moved on to a dual AMD 1.2 GHz Athlon MP system running based on a MSI K7D motherboard. This rig could heat a small room and sounded like a jet engine. With all the fans that were mounted in the case to keep processors cool there was no way to keep it quiet. I didn't really notice how noisy it really was till it was gone.

The list goes on and on. I was averaging a new computer every six months for a brief period.