'm what you might call a "cautious consumer." Every time I make a purchase that exceeds, say, $200, I cruise the internet for weeks on end to guarantee that I'm getting the best product available for my hard-earned cash. Usually, my research pays off, but every once in a while, this consumer falls flat on his arse. Case in point: the gaming rig I decided to purchase about ten months ago. I wanted a sound middle of the road gaming rig, primarily to play World of Warcraft. What I got was a black monolith that reminded me of all the reasons why I left PC gaming over a decade ago.
Rather than build a PC myself, I decided to go with a rather reputable manufacturer (who will remain nameless). As a long-time Macintosh user, I found the concept of juggling component compatibility to be downright horrifying — I didn't want to purchase motherboard 'X' and find that its drivers wouldn't talk well with graphics card 'Y'. For the most part, I succeeded. This particular manufacturer allowed me to choose from a vast array of graphics cards, motherboards, cases and power supplies. The rig that arrived at my house ran great out of the box, came with everything I needed and looked to be the machine to get me through many happy years of PC gaming. November 2008 was a good month indeed.
Then, spring came around. I'd decided it was time to attempt to update my graphics card drivers to enable better dual-head support. The process seemed easy enough — I went to the card manufacturer's website, downloaded a simple tool and had updated drivers moments later. All was great until I realized that one of my two graphics cards was no longer seen by my system. Oh, it was there, but it just sat, idle and unutilized. After finding my original drivers on an obscure Swedish database and re-downloading them, I started to look for the cause of my problem.
In short: component incompatibility — the exact thing that I'd been yammering on about with my PC-gaming buddies since the early nineties had landed squarely in my lap. As an open platform, the PC gives consumers a great degree of choice: you can pretty much tailor a computer to meet your exact specifications. The problem with this is that you, the consumer, have practically no guarantee that one component will work properly with another. Sure, Mac users have far less to choose from when purchasing a graphics card, hard drive, RAM or DVD-ROM drive. But when's the last time you overheard a Mac user griping about jumper pin settings or access violation exceptions? That's right — never (Mac users have their own laundry list of complaints).
Is there a point to my rant? Only that I've figured out why so many gamers have embraced consoles in recent years. It's great to walk into a store, purchase a game and bring it home knowing that it will almost certainly work just as well on your Xbox as it will on anyone else's. Being the tinkerer (and consummate consumer) that I am, I've already picked out a new motherboard, graphics card and processor for the inevitable rebuild of my "perfect" gaming rig. But when I run into that first driver issue sometime in the spring of 2010, I know that my consoles will be waiting there for me.
