You're right, Turtlefu, a high-end PC is a luxury item, but a few months' savings would cover it. I'm willing to bet you can save $20-50 a week by cutting back on the little luxuries of your day. In 3-4 months, you will have the funds for a PC that can play most games.
You'd have to fork over at least $1K to build yourself a mid-tier gaming PC, and about $1500 for near top-of-the-line. (No need to go higher unless you need a multiple-monitor setup and do intense video rendering/editing.)
If you're doing a lot of research, and your monitor isn't big enough, it's really hard. Is your laptop screen really big? Do you use a mouse? Speakers? All those peripherals make a researcher's life so much better.
God, after 2 years of using a teeny tiny little laptop screen to read PDFs in one window and type notes into a different window, and having the internet open in yet another window to check data, names, etc....I don't know how I did it without going crazy.
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