I bought a Saitek Yoke with trottle quadrant for myself as a christmas present

I really like it, and it makes flying (civilian) aircrafts very fun =)

It’s a bit large and bulky to place on the desktop, but it works very well and has a nice authentic feeling.

Let there be USB

As my computer is located in another room, 5 meters away from my desktop, I had to do some changes to the setup when I got this joystick.

I managed to replace 5 five meter long cables going from my computer to my desktop with 2 five meter USB cables (with repeaters). Before I had 2 audio cables (for microphone + headset) and 1 audio cable for the speakers, 2 PS/2 cables for mouse/keyboard, I also removed a s-video cable I was no longer using.

New sound card
Now I have a Creative SB X-FI go! USB sound card on my desk. This is much better than the integrated sound on my motherboard, and I can actually use my microphone to scream out stuff when I play Left 4 dead. I also bought a new headset to replace my old busted one. I got the Creative Fatal1ty gamer headset, which is awesome.

New mouse
I also bought a new USB mouse, as I was SICK of my wireless mouse and it’s appetite for batteries, and often I forgot to charge my spare batteries, so I had to steal the wii-controller batteries from Stacy which always pissed her off. I bought a pretty simple mouse, a Logitech MX518. Which I used before at work. It’s nice to have some extra buttons to bind as “push to talk” button for Ventrilo.

With USB on my desktop, I can now use my bamboo drawing tablet on my main pc, and not just the laptop.