Half-Life 2
I bought a new computer (mainly as an upgrade) and, coincidentally 
bought Half-Life 2. Around this same time I picked up Windows 2000. I finally decided to upgrade from 98SE.
Aaah… good ol’ Win 98SE… as stable as a bowling ball perched on top of a broom in high wind. But it was an excellent MP3 player. And the nice thing about playing Empire Earth in Win98SE is that I get to practice my patience as it crashes the game mid-battle… every hour. I managed not to toss my computer out my window.
So now I’ve got a cute little black machine from Systemax. It’s some kind of cheap motherboard, AMD Sempron 2800, 256M RAM, 80G hard drive, with three whole expansion slots. But that’s okay because just about everything is on the mainboard anyway: video, network, usb, etc. I think it’s even got a simple SATA RAID, but I’m sure not going to use that at this time.
I took out the weak-ass 300W power supply and put in my georgeous 500W X-Connect. Then I took out the CD-ROM reader that came with it and put in my burner. Then I added one of my old 80G hard drives so that I could move over some data.
BTW, the 7200 RPM drive that came with it is pretty darn quick. It’s so quick that I noticed it.
I also moved over my super-dope ATI Radeon 9600XT video card with it’s 256M RAM onboard. Funny how my video card has as much RAM as the computer.
Well, after playing Half-Life 2 for about 10 minutes and watching it crash, I decided to upgrade the RAM. I moved over the 512M DIMM from my old machine and now HL2 actually runs!
So, what it says on the box about “minimum system requirements” is bull-honkey. That’s the official term: bull-honkey. It does not run with a quarter-gig of RAM. You need at least a half-gig.
I’ll post more updates as I continue to dissappear into the world of Half-Life (again). Yup, that’s right… we’re goin’ back in.
