BreOl72: Fully agree: I just checked my old bills...the last PC I bought
(read above) is now 7 years old.
No upgrades necessary so far, besides adding some external HDDs.
System "history" for me:
- 1992: 386 SX 16 MHz, 512 kb probably Trident video card, 2 Mb RAM and I think 120 Mb HDD. Some chance it may have just been 80 Mb.
- 1994: 486 DX2 66 MHz, same video card as above, 4 Mb RAM later upgraded to 8 Mb, 540 Mb HDD.
- 1998: Pentium II 266 MHz, S3 Virge 4 Mb, 32 Mb SDR 66 MHz RAM later upgraded to 64 Mb, 3.2 Gb HDD with a 20 Gb one added I think in late 2001.
- 2002: Pentium 4A 2 GHz, GeForce 2 Ti 64 Mb, 512 Mb DDR RAM which in 2006 went down to 256 Mb as one module failed, the 20 Gb HDD mentioned above replaced with a 160 Gb one I think at the start of 2005.
- 2008: Core 2 Duo E8400 3 GHz dual-core, initially GeForce 8400 256 Mb upgraded to GeForce GTS 250 1 Gb in 2009, 2 Gb DDR2 1066 MHz 5-5-5-15 RAM, initially 500 Gb HDD replaced with a 250 Gb 10000 rpm one in early 2013 (a 500 Gb remained as backup, as the plan was 240 Gb SSD + 250 Gb HDD as main, but dropped the SSD idea).
- 2015: Pentium G3440 3.3 GHz dual-core, just using the integrated graphics, 4 Gb DDR3 1600 MHz 9-9-9-24 RAM, at first same HDDs as the upgraded configuration above but OS on the 500 Gb one, 250 Gb SSD added in 2018.
2-4-4-6-7 years, now almost 8 and counting, and this current one was way weaker at the time of purchase than the rest (maybe with the exception of the 386). Sure, it's limiting, but still doesn't feel nearly as much so as those I got in the '90s did, despite the much faster pace of upgrading.
As for why I joined, first purchases came 2.5 years later, when they added PSC and I had a way to pay. The very first was the Might and Magic bundle, followed by King of Dragon Pass, Gothic 2 Gold, Return to Krondor, King's Bounty Crossworlds GOTY and Sacred Gold... And then the "good news" hit and things went sour.
Because the real reason for joining was to support and get involved with the community built around what I saw as an organization dedicated to actively fighting the industry's rotten practices, first and foremost
both DRM and regional pricing, which organization had chosen to use a store to fund that fight, and which understood that, when it came to that store and the business aspects in general,
they competed with "pirates", not with other stores, so they had to offer a "package", in terms of the extra "goodies", support, community involvement and so on, that was sufficiently better than what could be "pirated" to make it worth paying for the game, recognizing that the game itself, completely DRM-free, could easily be obtained for free. The fact that they focused on older games and making them compatible with current systems was a bonus, since I almost always played quite old games (in part because of the computers I had, but not only), but it mattered much less. And once that facade of "crusaders" was shattered and they were revealed as businesspeople as any other, looking for profit and growth over principles and integrity, the games became pretty much irrelevant for good...