Randomly Mine: Cheap (Patreon)

Mother's Day, 8am, I'm gonna do it. I'm going to finally, after so much careful conversation and years of watching someone I care about waste their money, I was gonna finally get Mom to buy a PC. Yes, she's exclusively into Laptops these days, but PC Laptops have gotten really good over the years!

Slimbooks. Chromebooks. Gaming-Books? All the books!

Unfortunately, I spent a few more hours researching to narrow down the conversation to three Laptops. Regret quickly followed a morning phone call from the Mother in question who said she impulse purchased a new Macbook Air.

God. Fucking. Dammit.

Father's Day, I'm not gonna let the same thing happen.

Okay, I can't keep writing this like a novel. Long story short, I was successful! My Dad's got a PC that I built! Converting an ancient, hideous, shameful AMD Bulldozer build into a beautiful Ryzen machine capable of eating FL Studio for breakfast, and without breaking the bank. As no GPU was needed (I've placed an old 660 SC, and will supply my GTX 1080 after upgrading this year), it was all kept at $500. $500 Canadian dollars, which at this currency rate, you're lucky to avoid hitting at the bar.

What I took away from the experience however (aside from the joy of watching my Dad plug-in all the equipment that made Mac's sick without a hitch) was that PC building is... nice.

Now that I've done it enough times to not worry about breaking boards, zapping the circuits, or most importantly, installing everything in the wrong order, there's a real satisfaction when you build something in less than an hour, that'll give someone nearly endless hours of entertainment and education.

Not sure if I have the will to build an ITX XP machine, especially with my freaky fingers, but that I'm even considering such a thing's quite surprising when I thought Digital Ph33r's explosive capture card skit was a documentary.