With my study leave coming up, I expect to have more free time on my hands. Don’t worry, watchers of the public purse: I do have a bunch of work stuff to do over the year, but that’s another blog post.<\/p>\n
I think I need to reacquaint myself with PC gaming. I have a (slightly) old Athlon 64 system that isn’t actually being used right now with 1 GB RAM and 320 GB of hard drive. I figure this can be turned into a reasonable gaming rig with a minimal investment.<\/p>\n
I would probably drop in a new processor (like the Athlon 64 X2 5400+<\/a>) and new video card (perhaps an ASUS N7600GS<\/a>). That would be enough to run the kind of games I’m actually interested in: Portal<\/a>, Spore<\/a>, SimCity Societies<\/a>, Civilization IV<\/a>. I likes me a good god-game. I really don’t care much about online\/multiplayer gaming: I don’t need some 14 year old kid using the word “pwn” at me in my leisure time.<\/p>\n I’d need to get another keyboard and mouse, since USB+DVI KVM switches are unpleasantly<\/a> expensive<\/a>. (It’s probably harder to do the switching for USB than old PS2 connections. Don’t forget about buying cables with those too.) I can hook up to the VGA input on my LCD and switch the display that way.<\/p>\n After about $250, I should be ready to go. I can get a Windows XP license from work as long as I promise that it has something to do with teaching (which it undoubtedly will, regardless of the initial plan).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With my study leave coming up, I expect to have more free time on my hands. Don’t worry, watchers of the public purse: I do have a bunch of work stuff to do over the year, but that’s another blog post. I think I need to reacquaint myself with PC gaming. I have a (slightly) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}