Apologising to My PC

I love my PC.

Okay, let me be clear and say I am not part of the PC Master Race: I started on consoles, and it’s unlikely they’ll ever be fully phased out in my life. I still love playing with a controller in my hands and I can’t aim a gun with keyboard and mouse, but getting to experience why people love Steam and modding showed me what I was missing out on. I admit, I never thought about getting a PC in the past, being way too into the console wars back in the day, but I eventually grew out of that phase and decided to build my own.

Now, the PC I use both for gaming and work has been my loyal companion for the past five years, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything else in the world… except a better PC. It’s the first computer I’ve ever built and has allowed me to enjoy gaming much more than I would have if I just stuck to consoles.

Probably should've cleaned up a little before taking all these photos...

Which is why I feel I need to apologise. I’ve put my PC through some harsh things, mostly because of my incompetence. So, for the Australian holiday of National Sorry Day, I’m going to recount all the sins I can remember committing so I can reflect and face my technological demons.

Not Building It for Several Weeks

Okay, this was kind of understandable because, well, I ordered and received parts for my PC in 2020, and it was a seriously tough time for everyone. The sudden shift to online classes was wearing me down, being forced to use a laptop from 2007 was miserable, unable to go outside in fear of what might happen, and my family was going through a difficult period I’d rather not go into. I had the time, but I was just kind of… sad for a good part of the year, leaving it in boxes until I decided enough was enough.

Missing: A fidget Desert Eagle, toilet paper, and a single serving of instant noodles.

When I finally gathered the will to build it, it turned out to be pretty therapeutic. I heard it was like building a set with LEGO bricks and wasn’t as scary as it seemed, and in hindsight, it kinda was. You just had to be a lot more careful with it. That’s not to say it was a smooth process…

Buying the Wrong Heat Sink

Yeah, the first heat sink for the CPU was the wrong size. I couldn’t secure it to the motherboard without it falling off, so I had to buy a new one, which delayed the full build by a good week or so.

Look, it was dark. I had to use flash.

I still have that heat sink, but I think I was convinced to keep it instead of returning or selling it, just in case one of my other siblings wanted to make their own PC... they ended up buying pre-built ones.

Terrible Cable Management

When I actually did finish putting all the parts in, I now had to hook everything up to the power supply unit. There was a slight problem with that, though, and it’s the fact that I’ve never been the type of person you’d call… tidy. My inventory in games tend to look like messes that I only understand, and it’s the same with my cable management.

Oh yeah, I forgot, I lost two screws for the glass panel.

The back of my PC case doesn’t fully close and I’m definitely neutering airflow, but I don’t know how to fix it; it works and my temps are decent. As long as I regularly clean it, it should be fine, right?

Buying a Wi-Fi Dongle Instead of a Wi-Fi Card

I actually thought PCs just came with the ability to connect to the internet naturally. Although nowadays I just use an Ethernet cable connected directly to the router, I used to have a USB Wi-Fi thing to connect to the internet, and it was terrible!

My PC is at the opposite side of where the Wi-Fi router is in my house, so it would constantly lag and lose connection. It’s a wonder I actually got to download and play Steam games before I got an Ethernet cable.

Overheating

So, when I play one of my more intense games, I can hear my fans spin up. I’ve been told that it’s actually fairly quiet under load, which is nice. That being said, back before I knew what I was doing, hearing those fans spin up made me afraid because it usually came with my screens blacking out all of a sudden. This usually happens when I play more resource-demanding games or I bump my desk, but sometimes it just happens out of nowhere. Now, I thought the problem was cooling. I saw that my PC was suddenly jumping to dangerous temps even with barely any programs running, so I was looking into liquid cooling.

That wasn’t the solution.

It looks nice in the dark... but I can't see it.

I figured it out though thanks to a reddit thread I stumbled on. Turns out, a loose power cable was the cause of the problem, so all I did was shift it away from any connections and… boom! Fixed. I’ve lived in fear of losing progress in my games and constantly needing to restart my PC for years, and it was that easy! I felt so dumb.

Using Only 8 GBs of Ram

I don’t really care as much about FPS than one would think. I can live with 30 FPS for hundreds of hours and never feel like I’m lacking. However, as someone who gets paid to review games, it would be best to at least be able to run more modern games like, say, Dying Light 2 Stay Human or Wild Hearts. So, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to cheap out on the RAM and only get two 4 GB RAM sticks.

I didn’t upgrade my RAM until last year. I played HELLDIVERS 2 at sub-30 FPS… for 400+ hours, hitting the level cap. Finally putting down the money to order 16 GBs of RAM from Amazon has to be one of my better purchasing decisions.

Not Using the SSD I Had

So, there’s a story to this! My little sister, back when she was building her own gaming PC, had gotten a 500 GB SSD, but for some reason, it wasn’t working. Since I built my own PC (not that this article has proven it done competently), she came to me to see what was wrong. I decided to test it on my own PC to see if I could fix it, but nothing happened. We shrugged, thought it was defective or something and I just… left it in there.

That has been in there for a good while, unused.

Turns out, you needed to initialise it in the hard disk settings, which I realised while watching YouTube Shorts… last month. That SSD has been installed on my PC for several years at this point. I played 150+ hours of Monster Hunter Wilds with long load times and origami people. I moved Wilds to the SSD as soon as possible afterwards and it has been smooth sailing ever since.

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You know, looking back on all my issues, they were mostly self-inflicted. I just didn’t treat my PC with the respect it deserves, or give the love and care it needs to last as long as possible. So, I’m sorry, my dear PC, for putting you through all that in the past. I’m going to do better and make sure you’re properly well-maintained. I got an anti-sag stand recently, and I’m planning to get more RAM and more storage. I hope you’re ready for the long haul, because… no, nope! Don’t wanna jinx it.