[agumonkey]

Hehe, you're already far above the average joe level. As a teen I'd never have been able to really follow schematics, so just Lego playing with PCI cards and such was fun. That said, pre-built configs are never really what you want, I could keep using my old p2 350 because I had opportunity to pick nice enough video, sound cards and drives to improve dataflow in the system. Most on the shelf configs were 'HIGH SPEED CPU + crippled bottleneck coprocessors'.

ps: in the wintel world, I wouldn't call software a good part, unless you enjoy removing windows and drivers crapware, but you probably had clean distributable ghost images of some kind.

[freehunter]

What I meant by that was getting to launch your game. The fun part is when you see the Quake 3 launch window.

[agumonkey]

Hehe, personally I was fond of 3DMark for showing off then Half Life 2 for the stress.