I knew I gave this up for a reason

Now, I haven’t always been an XBOX gamer. In fact, I only recently switched joining the XBOX gamer ranks late in the original XBOX’s late lifecycle. Before that fateful day I was a hardcore PC gamer. Like most switchers, I left my custom gaming rig behind because I was tired of having to constantly pay to upgrade my box so I could run the latest and greatest games.

I say it was a custom box because, indeed, I did build it myself. You see, I’m what’s known as an A+ Certified Computer Technician. Of course, every true tech out there will tell you that the only thing A+ means is that you can open up a case without poking your eye out with a screwdriver.

So, my computer (which I create all of my comics on) has slowly become obsolete over the years since I haven’t put any money into it. Today I was fortunate enough to receive payment for a contact I was working on. After some discussion with my better half I have decided to drop a portion of it on a new computer.

Confident in my old knowledge of computers (now over five years old) I went to an online retailer with visions of selecting all my parts and building my new PC. Here’s how that went:

“There are how many socket types now?!”
“WTF is SATA?!”
“PCI-E???! What happened to AGP!!!?”
“Core Duo E6400? Why don’t these things have GHz specs??!”
“Who is Conroe?”
“320GB… THAT’S HUGE!!!!”

… and on and on and on…The land has changed since I was last building computers. After that horrifying experience I called up a friend who (while laughing at me) walked me through the paces of selecting all my components… which will be assembled by the nice people at the retailer. I’m just too afraid of breaking something to do it myself.

I guess it really is true, “You can never go home again”.