Couple Bonding Through PC Building 465
mikemuch writes "When his lovely girlfriend Glenda needed a new PC, Jason Cross, who spends much of the week assembling PCs with the latest gear to test for ExtremeTech, decided he would let her build it herself. She gave him her list of needs, he came up with a part list, and then watched as she did all the screwdriver wielding herself. Despite a DOA hard drive and some mis-connected wires, everyone was smiling when it was all finished. (Slide show here.)"
reality (Score:5, Interesting)
This article doesn't read so much as "hey guys, it's possible for a girl to put together a PC", so much as it reads "Hey guys, look at my girlfriend. No, really, I have one. Let me show you her."
Re:How is this news? (Score:5, Interesting)
Schools (Score:2, Interesting)
And it really doesn't take more than a couple hours for all the kids to get a hands on experience with it.
Yeah honey, I listened to your needs, honest! (Score:5, Interesting)
Heavy Internet surfing (multiple windows)
Store and play plenty of music
Store and manage big digital art files, including many-layered Photoshop files
Operate quietly
Play the latest games without turning details way down
2GB of ram will just about get Vista running with a little left over for smaller PSDs. The size PSDs she's talking about will be thrashing the hard drive to run. Doubling that ram up to 4GB, what's generally regarded as the sweet spot for Vista anyway, and dropping to a $300 graphics card would serve her far better for her main needs and let her still run pretty much any modern game with pretty decent quality settings.
But, hey, he gets to reassure himself it's a sweet gaming rig with that quad core processor and the 8800. Just a shame that was lowest on her list of requirements and likely added after a few rounds of, "Are you sure you wouldn't like to play games? I know they're not your main focus. But surely you'd like the option, right?"
Even ignoring that she plays Civ IV and Oblivion (both of which will run just fine on much cheaper hardware), he commits a cardinal sin amongst gamers too: He bought what he figured would be great for running a game in the future (Spore), not what was needed for her level of gaming now. Spore won't be out until sometime next year and probably late spring at the earliest from what they're saying. That $100 off the GPU now wouldn't cost her much right now, would get her the memory that would really aid her, and she'll likely want to upgrade to whatever the latest and greatest GPU is in a year's time for Spore anyway. At that point, it'll be pretty much guaranteed that $300 on nVidia's 9xxx series will beat $400 on the 8xxx series now and have whatever fun and exciting new features the 9xxx series has that nVidia worked with Maxis to get in to Spore.
It's cool to share building their PC with your girlfriend/wife/mother/friend/anyone who wouldn't normally build one, giving them a real sense of ownership and achievement with their new PC. But fooling yourself in to believing they need what you think is cool, rather than actually listening to their needs, is a great way to undo a lot of that when they realize they got you something cool rather than built what was right for them.
And, yes, this comes from a guy who sat there while his wife tapped on dozens of keyboards because she figured I'd make sure it simply worked and so the most important thing to her was the keyboard felt right. To me, that was crazy. To her, it was what mattered. So, crazy or not, I listened and made sure she got what felt perfect to her.
Re:Yeah honey, I listened to your needs, honest! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interesting? Not really. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How is this news? (Score:3, Interesting)
As for this being front-page
Oh, enuf with the chick bashing (Score:2, Interesting)
There's a huge amount of learning that goes on when just assembling a PC for the first time, let alone picking parts. The first thing to go is the "Where's the hard drive again? That big box under my desk?" type of questions. The next thing that goes is the "I can't do it! You click the mouse for me and make it work" mentality. Computers are not rockets (anymore). They're commodity parts thrown together in a case, running (for most systems sold today anyway) a crappy OS that most ppl find "ok". And assembling the system by hand would give most people the vocabulary to talk intelligently about their systems.
Not to mention the social (gasp!) aspect of putting a computer together. You can learn a lot from someone just having them help you - and that help makes a bond. Maybe we geeks could benefit socially as a group if we all had manditory "help the neighbor assemble his/her computer" day.
Re:How is this news? (Score:2, Interesting)