I’m not immune to that irrational surge of emotion one gets when receiving a new toy.\u00a0 And in my case, I get most excited about computer hardware – surprise, surprise.<\/p>\n
My windows XP gaming computer handled all my favourite late ’90s and early ’00s games like Age of Empires, Lords of the Realm II, Civilization II and the like.\u00a0 It was, however, a refurbished HP Compaq office PC without a video card, and with only a modest Pentium D inside.\u00a0 It was better than what I was using for XP gaming before, but it was by no means a proper gaming computer.<\/p>\n
That PC was loud because its fans were always on.\u00a0 And because the processor and RAM were always running hot, the PC eventually died on me.\u00a0 I was always expecting that.\u00a0 I only paid about $200 for it.<\/p>\n
So off to ebay I went looking for a replacement.\u00a0 And I found something really nice: an HP Z200 workstation with an Intel Core i3.\u00a0 And I only paid $100 for it, plus $50 shipping.\u00a0 Even better, I was able to put an unused low profile graphics card into it that wouldn’t fit into the HP Compaq that had just died.<\/p>\n
My “new” computer is about 8 years old, and from what I could tell, they were originally selling for around $2,500.\u00a0 Well, gosh.\u00a0 It’s nice to have something that can finally run my copy of Scrapland<\/a> that I bought.\u00a0 That game will only run on Windows XP, and isn’t available on Steam or GOG.com.\u00a0 Hooray!<\/p>\n