How it Started

PREFACE:

This is written for the intent to be read by newbs. So I’m going to do my best to spell everything out and put things in laymen terms. It wont give all the answers, because damn it, there are a LOT, this will just walk you through mine.

HOW IT STARTED:

Back in December I wanted to start playing World of Warcraft (WoW) again after a several month hiatus. It took over twelve hours to reinstall the game, two expansions and all the updates, had it not been easily accessible from the WoW web page it probably would have taken longer doing it with disks by hand (thank you Blizzard.). I was delighted when I was finally given the cue that I could start playing. Sadly, I could barely get the game to run at more then 4 frames per minute (fpm). I remember having this difficulty before and it had been an issue with the video drivers. Here’s where the issues start.

In the course of my life I’ve owed two desktop computers and one laptop (currently just the laptop). All of which were picked out and taken care of by an ex. So anytime something was wrong or needed to be updated he’d do it. Where as this was convenient it was also annoying, because he didn’t have the patience to show me how to do it myself, and damn did I want to, it has left me stumbling to figure things out on my own. Anyways, trying to update the drivers was an issue because I had no idea what they were or where they were, so it took more time for me to figure out how to find them then it did to actually update them. When I got that far updated drivers did nothing to upgrade the performance of the game. So I rolled back the drivers, basically un-updated them. No luck there, and bummed because it was a technique that I remember having had worked for the ex.

Next idea I had was that maybe I just had too much crap on my computer. So I went to uninstall anything and everything I could. I deleted word files and games that I never played, and other add on items that I knew weren’t necessary to the operation of my laptop. Afterward I defragmented (defraged) the hard drive.  However, there were still scads of things that I had no idea what they were or why they were on my computer. All I did know, was at some point in time or another, I was told to leave them alone by the ex. Great! I tried putting some of the names in  Google Search but that only made me more confused then I already was. What little memory I was able to free up did nothing to improve the game quality.

From there I tried installing more memory. The laptop was bought for playing WoW and playing on the internet. My guess was that with installing Photoshop CS5 it was eating at too much memory to play WoW like I should have been able to. Since I have a student edition of the program I’m allowed one install so it’s tied to my laptop until the laptop dies. Adding more memory didn’t work either. Maybe I put in more then the rest of components are able to run, who knows, I didn't bother to check because this was about the time I decided I was building my own computer.

No more getting bundles pre-picked by someone else, with programs pre-installed. Nope. I’m going to know everything from the hardware to the software that’s in my machine. I’m going to know what everything does and how to fix it when it doesn’t work. And damn it, I like building things.

These last few months I’ve been learning the what’s what of computer components and how they work. I’ve been researching parts and the bare minimums I need to run what I want to run. I’m finally to the point where I feel comfortable making decisions and this week I start making selections and purchases.

The rest of the blog will be about the resources that I’ve used, the components I’ve chosen, the build itself, how it all turned out, and possibly any future builds. Mostly, this is for me, but if this blog helps anyone else out, well that’s just a bonus.