PC Gaming can be a tricky front - I was disappointed to discover that my brother-in-law's laptop was incapable of running Magikca (I bought a 4-pack so I could do co-op with him). My wife's old laptop couldn't run Penny Arcade's first video game, but she could play WoW on it...

If you can get it working it can be a blast with always free multiplayer and the best servers for it, but it can also be a huge headache.

I wholeheartedly agree.

I'm in a pretty similar boat to Cub here. I picked up a super junker laptop years ago to keep my FFXI fix going, but it wasn't much for other games and I stuck to my consoles.

Picked up a new rig back in November and it's about the furthest thing from what I remember 'PC Gaming' being. I'm not having to tool around w/ drivers or have things not-run for no apparent reason. It's almost like having a console - I throw at game at it, it runs (minor disappointment w/ how the new Deus Ex runs, but it's minor graphical things mostly)

Getting used to the Mouse/KB is pretty weird though...mostly how sensitive and accurate the mouse is compared to R-Sticks. The abundance of hotkeys is w/o a doubt the best part of the M/KB set up.

I'm in a new PC shopping pickle as well. I've got many of my friends jumping over to Star Wars The Old Republic, and I'm sorely tempted to join them. But to do it, the cheapest PC I've found with the system requirements is hitting over the $400 mark. Plus, I'd really like to switch over to the Mac side, but many PC games come only for Windows and barely run on Mac even with the BootCamp app.

ha ha ha.. This was a good read. I'm glad I'm not the only one.. I've purchased a few of the humble bundles and even have portal 1 and 2 on my PC but I cant play them... I just cant get used to using the keyboard to move. If I could use a Wii nunchuck just for the movement and the mouse for the aiming and shooting, I would be doing pretty good. (aside from the lack of buttons) I have a cheap usb controller but I can never get it configured properly, and then to be honest, the system requirements always intimidate me because I dont understand the GPU stuff... I understand RAM and Processor speed and HDD space and such, but the other specs are hard for me to understand for some reason.

I've been PC gaming off and on for years. I spent most of the N64/PS1 era on PC's and then switched to consoles for the Gamecube/XBOX/PS2 years. I got a Wii in 2006, and XBOX 360 in 07 (which is now dead), and a PS3 in '08. Finally, in '09, I dropped some major cash (around $800) and built me a new gaming PC from the ground up. Since then I've been rediscovering my lost love of PC gaming. It took me a month or two to get back in the full swing of things (and to catch up with system reqs) but now that I have I'm glad I came back.

I got a new desktop PC in September and am really happy with it. Been playing more and more on Steam lately. I like the fact that many PC games today have native support for the Xbox joypad, so I've been using that. Otherwise a small app called xpadder can be handy to setup a game for joypad use.

For those who are unsure about system requirements, they can check out this website. Its not 100% accurate of course, but will give you a general idea how the game will perform on your machine.

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/intro.aspx

Hi Andrew,
I was a PC Gamer most of my life, until some years ago I bought a PS3 and a 360. Until then I knew about hardware specifications and all that stuff, but since then PC gaming has evolved a lot - or the hardware has. Some weeks ago I decided to get a better laptop again - a HP Pavilion. I tried to play Starcraft and was really surprised that it didn't run smoothly, even though I easily had the recommended system requirements. Even the lowest grafics settings only ran with about 10 fps.As I did not have any recent experience with PCs I had no idea what to dom and was really unhappy about spending a lot of money on a laptop that doesn't work properly. I did some research and found out that there is a tool, called cataclyst control center, or ccc. chances are that if your laptop is similar to mine and you have an ati grafics card that this tool is on your machine as well. the thing is that this tool is meant to switch between onboard grafics (standard mode) to the 'real' grafics card when more is needed. but somehow this doesnt work, and you have to tell this tool manually that it should use the more powerful grafics card. perhaps you can enjoy a far better gaming experience as well when adjusting the settings!

@Crabman

Thanks for the tip!