Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Will Farmville run on this NVIDIA GeForce 330 GPU with 1GB VRAM?

I hate stupid people, but what I hate even more than an honestly stupid person is an otherwise intelligent person who insists on trying to sound knowledgeable about something they aren't. Unfortunately, being in the business of selling computers, I get to deal with this a lot.

See, it bothers me a lot less when someone honestly just doesn't know what they're doing, because there are a lot of things I myself don't know about. I happen to talk and sell computers all day long, so I know something about that. But can I explain a carburetor or even change my own windshield wipers without a fuss? Nope, and I'm okay with that. Why aren't other people okay with not knowing everything about everything? I don't get it and in fact I find it both ignorant and unflatteringly egotistical... well, ok... what I want to say is that I think those people are just assholes.

As I mentioned, I sell computers all day and there are a lot of computers out there for all different needs and tastes. People come to me all the time (with no intention of buying I'd bet) and complain "Why does this model X not have the latest feature, which is Y". I'll look at them, knowing that neither feature would matter for what this person want to use a computer for, and I just want to strangle them sometimes.

The fact of the matter is that most people only use their computers for the same few things, over and over -- the web, email, some word processing, maybe a little graphics here and there, and then there's entertainment like movies and games. Almost everyone, everywhere does this and yet people keep acting as though they need to shop only where the latest, most powerful computers ever made are sold. Nevermind that if I were to stock said computers, these folks would never buy, due to the astronomical prices they'd command.

But there they'll go, every time. "Oh, I need nothing less than a Core i7 processor, with 8GB and a 2GB graphics adapter. I'll also need it all in an 11" screen size, with 4K resolution. Can you do that?"

Yeah, buddy. With all that, your Mafia Wars on Facebook are just going to look AWESOME.

Look, I get that everyone has to learn it sometime, but just because you clicked a link once or a technical magazine fell open in front of you today, doesn't mean that you know something, okay? Let those who know, inform you, even if they make less money per hour than you do. The fact is, I may not be able to afford that laptop you'll be bragging about owning, but I guarantee I'll understand what it does more than you do.

So think about that the next time one of you is about to give me shit about the system I'm selling you having "only" a maximum 8GB of DDR2 RAM (not DDR3!?! I'm going to tell!) and that the 13" screen isn't 1080p (shock! horror!) --- when you and I both know that the most complex task you perform is to download pirated movies and play Farmville.