My Father’s Day adventure included replacing the family gaming computer (a 2011 Mac Mini… don’t judge)

One of the benefits of working at Seton Hill is they provide me with a MacBook Air and an iPad. I turn them in every few years for an upgrade. The computer the kids use for gaming is a Mac Mini that I bought in 2011, with a virtual machine that runs Windows. It has served us well, but like most Mac devices, it’s not very upgradeable.

The boy had been been eagerly anticipating playing the Incredibles LEGO game. I bought it on Steam a few days ago, but it was locked until the Incredibles 2 opened. When it finally opened, it gave a message saying the graphics card wasn’t up to snuff. After I refreshed my memory on how long ago I bought the Mac Mini and what I paid for it, I figured it was time for an upgrade. I found a modest gaming computer on Amazon, printed out the page, and took it to Best Buy for price-matching. It was a nontrivial chunk of change, but I spent exactly what I planned to spend and ended up walking out the door with a better computer — really, it was 2 or 3 steps above what I had decided to buy.

Our Internet at home is very slow, so I took the computer to my office (I had to borrow a video cable from a classroom) and used the campus WiFi to install Steam and download The Incredibles game again. Even with the campus WiFi it took a couple hours, so I took the boy on the track, to dinner at the cafeteria, met the wife and girl at a late Sunday Mass, then took the boy back to my office, where he happily played the game for about an hour. I then put the computer back in its box, returned the borrowed cable to the classroom, and set it up again at home.

The HP tower takes up a little more space than the Mac Mini, doesn’t it?

While the girl was at home taking her 10th-grade standardized tests, I spent all afternoon and most of the evening on the computer upgrade quest with the boy. We decided to go out for Father’s Day later in the week.