<n>This essay is written as a response to the <a href="http://wilshipley.com/blog/2006/09/it-is-what-it-is-cpu-giveaway.html" source="Call Me Fishmeal" author="Wil Shipley">CPU giveaway</a>.</n> I double-click the GTA: San Andreas icon and watch, relieved, as the Windows desktop fades to black. *Churn* The intro graphic's looking a little pink. Drat. The font's messed up. *Restart game* Again with the pink logo, but the font's ok. Let's load up a saved game and do some driving. Funky music accompanies the fade from the loading screen to Carl's back. A quick look around confirms that Carl was taking some serious psychadelics in his downtime because everything around him is awash in garish, flickering polygons. *Restart game* All right! The intro's not pink---that's a good sign. Hey, where's the menu? Patience is a virtue and, after a while, the menu appears, but the mouse barely moves. *Three finger salute* Yup, there's a nasty little <c>svchost.exe</c> gulping down 100% of the CPU for itself. I wonder if I need a new graphics driver? That's probably it---there's never been a gaming problem that couldn't be made worse with a good old graphics driver upgrade. *Installing...* White intro, normal mouse, funky music---things are looking good so far. Load up the most recent save game ... fade in to Carl's back and ... no psychadelics! Hooray! Carl's kicked the habit. Wait a minute. Why are all the cars suddenly pink? *breathes deeply* So it seems that GTA and Nvidia's latest driver don't play well together. Can it be? Or ... it can't be the machine, can it? Not the good, old Alienware? Ok, maybe it is the machine. It <i>has</i> become somewhat of a Frankenstein's monster over the years. It started out as a top-of-the-line gamer's dream-come-true about six years ago and has seen a lot of action. In those days, it could slap around any game you threw at it, laughing at Quake III's desperate attempts to push it below 50 FPS. It shrugged off masterpieces like NOLF and NOLF II as if they were nothing. Then the hard drive got a bit cramped for the newer, hotter games. The resolution had to be 640x480 more often than not. It couldn't read DVDs. It was starting to show its age. This wasn't the first time this had happened. Six years ago it, the "new hotness", had replaced an even older machine---its brother-in-arms and the first machine I purchased from Alienware. That one is 8 years old and has also been heavily upgraded; it's currently doing sterling service as my web/mail/Perforce server. Waste not, want not. So the "new hotness" was starting to fall behind too. Upgrades worked for its brother---and they worked again. Just replace what you need; there was no PC recycling in those days, so it would have been wasteful to toss the machine and get a new one. It soon had a DVD player, new memory and a bigger hard drive. Over the next few years, it plowed through Max Payne I and II, Riven, Uru, some C&C and a Serious Sam or two. Thanks to a recent super-cheap video card upgrade, it even took on Doom III, Half-Life II and now, GTA: San Andreas. Even in the relatively shaky/flaky state described above (after reverting to an older version of the NVidia driver), it's stalwart service has helped me to an 88% completion level. But, back to upgrading. After an upgrade, there's always a pile of parts left over---what to do with them? I built a computer for my mom, who didn't have one. I built one for my future father-in-law. I built one for my future brother-in-law. I managed to save some parts, cases and other things that my company was going to throw away. I was recycling left and right. That way, the perfectly respectable parts got recycled instead of thrown into a landfill. All three PCs are still in service today---my father-in-law even uses his for <i>gaming</i> as he's continued the upgrading and recycling tradition. The two Alienwares are venerable machines, which even made a journey across the Atlantic---complete with two Viewsonic monitors, which are also still in service---so loathe was I to throw anything away. One lives out its golden years as a Debian server and is perhaps finally over the trauma of having had to run Windows these many years; the other has become a gaming-only box, as a Mac Mini purchased over a year ago has eclipsed it in every other way. But its best gaming days are behind it. It's tough to justify buying a new rig when it's just a gaming machine---even the graphics card it recently got was only a desperate bid to keep it in service. For almost a decade, I've managed to both maintain a gaming machine and avoid throwing anything away through judicious recycling. I know somebody who could use a good all-around machine, a duty for which it is still more than fit. I just need a little help making it recyclable.