In defence of patching, crashing and tinkering

Wednesday, December 10th, 2008

PC gaming gets a bad rap, especially from the console crowd – whereas they rock up, slide a disk into their slot-loading optical drive and play away, enjoying the latest games on the PC is, well, a more frustrating, long-winded and drawn-out experience – and it’s all the better for it.

Ask any avid PC gamer and they’ll regale you with stories of the many hours spent getting their machine to work at all. Putting in a new graphics card sounds like a basic upgrade but can often deteriorate into a horrendous rigmarole of driver updates and seemingly random problems and crashes. And that’s a relatively simple upgrade.

I should know the pain of upgrading: I recently built a new PC from scratch. My old rig really wasn’t cut out for gaming any more – it ran on integrated graphics and had no PCI Express slot – so it was definitely time for a change.

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