Dear Future Gamer,

I am getting a bit concerned about the home PC market. In one way it's great to see new and exciting products come onto the shelves in stores but in another way it's getting me down!

I'll explain. I bought my first PC a few years ago - a mighty P120 Pentium! This was good - not only was it the top of the line (then) but it opened my world to PC games. A few years later and it was as obscelete as a manned lighthouse! I got rid of it (to my dad!!!) and bought a spanking P2 266 with 32 Mb RAM. Shock horror! Now I needed more RAM and a 3D card so off I went and splashed out on a 3Dfx card and 64Mb RAM.

Now when I go into the stores they are flogging P2 400s and just this week Intel announce the new Pentium 3 chip; also voodoo have announced the voodoo3 card. To put it plainly - bugger! No sooner do I upgrade than my trusty PC is crap again. What's the answer? Go out each week and buy a new PC to keep up with the technology or simply carry on and play new games that need higher specs to run properly?

What will the next few years hold for us lowly home PC users who can't afford to keep upgrading but want to play the new software titles? God only knows! I just wish software companies could produce top notch games to run smoothly on all machines. Obviously I can't stop progress but sometimes I wish it could slow down a little so my wallet can take a breather now and again!!

Yours (probably obsolete)

Dave

FG: There isn't the space to go into this argument in depth here, suffice to say that PC gamers are always going to lose the upgrade war. The simple answer? If your main concern is playing games, buy yourself a console. Not very helpful I know but it kind of solves the upgrade problem.