The Great Distracto Part II: Use Cases

Flash back to that picture in the last post of my current desktop struggling to keep up with a fifteen year old game, and it should seem pretty reasonable that I want an upgrade for my office. Please ignore the fact that I already have a low-end MacBook Air and a four year old mid-range Windows PC. Those laptops serve specific functions not served by my would-be new desktop. Like being able to game when I'm supposed to be writing. But what else do I need it to do?

One of my favorite parts of building a computer is picking components. But the first thing you have to do is define your use cases.

For this computer, I need to be able to do some gaming. Okay maybe "need" is an exaggeration, but that's what I intend to do. Also, as a fiction writer, I find making my characters in the Sims can be a useful experiment, especially when suffering from a block. I don't need something that can "murder" games, but I want to be able to run Sims 4 and Skyrim without issue, even supporting some minor modding.

I'd absolutely love to be able to take full advantage of Windows Ink and the cool artistic features built into the Windows 10 Creators Update, but for now that's just not a realistic option. Pen-enabled monitors are expensive and not very good, which is a bad combination. Hopefully in a couple years we'll move more in that direction.

Otherwise my needs are mostly minimal - internet and word processing, but because Scrivener, my preferred writing software, functions far better in MacOS than on Windows, I at least want the option of doing something I never have before: making a "Hackintosh" by installing MacOS on my home build, which means making sure my parts are compatible with the software.

Finally, I need it to be compact in size, which is actually fairly limiting because I want just enough space for a beefy graphics card and a full-size power supply.

So these are the things I need:

• Moderate gaming abilities
• Scrivener
• Small form factor
• Still big enough for the parts I want to put in it.

Any time I make a big new purchase like this, I write these things down. What do I need, what do I really want, and what would be nice to have. Then I think of ways to obtain each of those things, and from there I figure out which solution best matches my uses with my budget.

What about you? Do you need an upgrade? What you want out of a new computer? Picture whether you want to be pretty much the same as whatever you've got now, or if it needs to offer new features. How much will you sit at the computer vs. using your smartphone or tablet for your tech needs? What operating system will you use? Make sure you think all these things out before you start buying components, because you have to make sure your parts are compatible not only with each other, but also with your budget and your life.