5 years ago, I was in the dark.
For the longest time (most of my life) I never had the pleasure of owning a good PC. Everything I had always owned was usually from my parents who were working people with no time for games, so I usually only had work computers to do stuff with. They were fine for doing dumb stuff like; say, Flash Games, ROBLOX, and Blockland, but seeing all these cool games like Counter-Strike, Garry's mod, Team Fortress 2, etc. on Youtube made me long to play them, for which I couldn't without terribly bad graphics issue and lag (plus I was like 12 or 13 with no money outside of my folks who didn't approve of violent video games like those so I could only settle for the demo of HL2 at most because it was free). Hell I didn't even touch the original Half-Life until I was in high-school, and that was on the aforementioned VAOI so it still suffered horribly (couldn't use the OpenGL setting in graphics). It wasn't until sometime in October 2012 where after a well spent 700 or something dollars, I had acquired this:
This thing changed my life. Suddenly, games like those made by Valve were available, all the games I used to play were running incredibly better, Sony Vegas and FL studio worked much more efficiently, and I could finally load more than 1000 bricks in Blockland before it started lagging horribly. This thing has suffered with me through the worst of times, but it's always been there in the best of times too. I discovered some great people and communities during my time with this laptop, and I've enjoyed my time with it. But you know what they say, all good things must come to an end.
Recently, my laptop has started overheating. It's gotten to the point where, ironically enough, I can't even run the original half-life without fearing for my laptop to overheat. That's the problem with laptops; they're hard to reliably vent and they don't last long. This is especially true of laptops made for gaming (which I guess is true of my laptop) so evidently, I can only assume that the insides of my latpop have melted and degraded to a point where I can't really do anything more with it. Still, 4 years isn't that bad of a run I guess. So anyways, I can really only use my laptop for browsing the internet, and I don't even know how long I can reliably do that. Buddy, it's been a good run, but I've gotta find an actual rig now and lay you to rest. It's been a good 4 years.
RIP 2012-2016.
Now, on a more light-hearted note, I need a good rig to replace my friend here. You guys got any good examples? Don't want no pre-built stuff, I want to build it myself like a man.
