Fun and games in nerd territory

virtually real by Janette Young - Connect Sunday Times issue 1 Feb 18th 2001
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It was the game that did it. Or, to be precise, Diabolo II.

"Let's get a new computer," suggested my husband airily, picking up the garish box and rattling it hopefully, thinking longingly of slaying skeletons and evil monsters.

"Let's not," I said. "You don't want to buy into that fun and games again, do you? The illegal shutdowns, the CD hiccups, the corrupt floppies, the viruses creeping through the email and into the hard drive..."

"Yeah, but the games are fun."

I sighed. We were standing in the middle of our local computer store and there they were - the latest in modern technology, svelte in their plastic cases.

"Okay, we'll take a look."

"This one looks good." It did, too. But it was the obvious choice - and designed for those fools who wouldn't have the first idea of how to set up a computer unless all the wires were colour-coded.

"No," I said, "let's have a really good look around. Probably find a much better buy.

"This one," I said, peering at a label, "has a 128MB SDRAM, a 20-gigabyte hard drive, a 16-megabyte NVIDIA TNT2 graphics adaptor..."

"What's a megabyte?" asked my six-year-old. "A mega-sandwich," shot back my 10-year-old.

We were the original babes in the wood, lost in a forest of Celeron, GeForce, Voodoo and graphics cards. In desperation, we hit the newsagents and found, marvel of marvels, a best buys guide.

"Says here," I read as the others huddled round, "that this one achieves 71 frames a second at a resolution of 1024x768 with high texture detail.

"And," I went on, "upgrading shouldn't be a problem because the motherboard has no fewer than six PCI and three DIMM slots. So that's good," I finished brightly. "I think."

But it was brave talk. We knew we were floundering, so we headed for computer nerd country, away from the big stores, hoping for serious expert advice.

At last we found a lone, and lonely, man playing solitaire who seemed to have less idea than we did, if it were possible.

At the second place we hit paydirt - a serious nerd complete with spots, glasses held together by sticky tape, a wan complexion and an enthusiasm that knew no bounds.

Yep, he was full of detailed, incomprehensible, but no doubt useful, advice. No, we weren't getting any wiser.

After half an hour of listening politely to jargon that meant nothing to us, we thanked him and fled, completely confused.

It was late in the day, and my head hurt. I flicked open the best buys mag again and ran my finger down the list. And there it was.

"This company usually provides systems that are easy to set up, easy to use and easy to maintain straight out of the box..."

"Colour coding?" asked my husband hopefully.

I read on. "Yep."

"Pre-programmed software?"

"Uh huh."

"Recovery CD?"

"Sure thing."

"Well, I think it has a lot to offer."

I wasn't about to argue. We went back to the first store, grabbed the computer we had first looked at, the copy of Diabolo he'd fondled that morning and bore our colour-coded toy home in triumph.

Let the games begin.

Page created on March 4th 2001 and updated on January 30th. 2014.   technical