Ken's Take: Time for an Upgrade

So as it turns out, the buses throughout the city are on strike. Found this out after working for 2 hours to get to my lab. Yeah... I gotta start listening to NPR on a more regular basis...

So... I recently celebrated my 2 year anniversary and my wife, the awesome woman that she is, got me Starcraft II as a gift.

Am I Excited? (I capitalized the E because it looked weird otherwise.)

Immensely.

However! There is a slight problem. I've had this game for a couple days now, but am yet to play it. Why is this? Well simply put, my computer sucks. For whatever reason when it installed it didn't do so correctly and now I'll need to do a reinstall when I get home today. I discovered this while trying to get patch 1.0.1. That's right, the first patch of the season and the downloader crashes on me. Hopefully a reinstall will do the trick, but if not, well then I'm in for several grueling hours of computer hell because I'll be damned if I'm not going to get to play this game.

This brings me to my primary point for today's post: Is it time for an upgrade?

Now I've had my laptop for about 3 years now and boy oh boy have I used the hell out of it. I've spent hours rummaging through Vista's wonder filled registry and programs list trying to optimize my rig to get all that I can get out of it. My computer set-up at home uses: Mic port, Headphone port, all four USB ports, the VGA port for an external monitor, and, of course, the ethernet port. If I could, I'd also make use of the S-video, but we all know that'd be pointless with the VGA. Anyways, the point is that I get a certain sense of satisfaction out of making full use of any electrical device that I own.

Take my blackberry for instance. I'm posting this very blog from my bb while waiting for some cell cultures to finish spinning down.

Now, as far as specs is concerned, everything on my comp is still mostly usable... except for the integrated graphics chipset. For those of you that aren't exactly computer tech savvy, an integrated chipset compares to an actual graphics card like a garden snake compares to an anaconda. You would clearly prefer to use one over the other when dealing with say an angry tiger that wants to find out what makes you tick. In our scenario, the tiger is pretty much any graphics intense program (video game, video editing, etc), the anaconda is pretty much every other decent graphics card out there, and the garden snake is, well, the chipset.

Now I've had to make do with what I've been given, and by no means am I ungrateful. However my little garden snake (I've come to realize this was a poor analogy to use, but am too lazy to fix it), despite being trained and tuned to become a friggin ninja, can still only handle so much.

I think the main issue I'm having is justifying spending the cash (I will have funds available) to upgrade. Honestly, my primary concern is video games, which isn't exactly the best reasoning to drop $500-$700 on an upgrade. However, I do have a legit reason in video editing. My computer simply cannot do video editing. It can't handle it processor wise, graphics wise, and RAM wise and video editing is something that I'd really like to do more of.

Bah! I'll figure it out later. For now though, my goal is to figure out Starcraft II and go from there. I am curious though, when do you think is a good time to upgrade? Am I being selfish or do I have a legit reason to upgrade? What makes you decide it's time for an upgrade? Let me know in the comments!

-Ken

PS:For those of you who haven't cast a vote I suggest doing so, I'll give it until this Saturday before I decide. Just take a peek at my last post if you're a bit lost.

[EDIT]: Added tags.