Games did not run very good on my Lenovo laptop. Planetside 2 ran at 15FPS, and my modded minecraft base dropped from 30FPS to 10FPS over the course of establishing basic-level Thaumcraft and power generation. That was the reason to build this computer.

I made a PowerPoint presentation to convince my mom to finance this $700 expenditure for my birthday. I waxed poetic about how it would be so good for me to learn about computers and also it would last a long time and how the alternative, a pre-built, would be more expensive. I suppose my presentation was convincing enough, so she agreed.

The parts all arrived on the day before my birthday or something along those lines. I remember the process of assembling it was simultaneously exciting and scary – what if it didn’t work? What if I put something in wrong, and all $700 of that went down the drain?

Anyways, that didn’t happen, it booted the Windows install disk on the first try.

It enjoyed 5 years of service. Then I went to college and my mom needed a new computer, so I removed the GPU, moved it into a smaller case, and gave it to her. It’s still running very well.