Prompted by a post by Iain about his new machine, I finally got round to buying a new graphics card to go along with mine. After roughly 5 mins looking at Overclockers.co.uk (which Iain pointed me to when I asked him about his card), I had my Switch card out, and was reducing my bank balance. On Friday afternoon, my shiny new MSI Geforce NX6800GT (256M, AGP) arrived.

Having never owned a high end card before, I've still not quite come to terms with the situation. I can run new games at 1280x1024 with all the eye candy turned on! I may even get round to reinstalling Doom 3, which may run slightly better than 5 fps at 800x600 with the lowest settings.

The obligatory run of 3D Mark 2005 gives a very respectable score of 4783, which although nice, doesn't really mean anything in the real world. Needless to say though, Far Cry, Half Life 2, etc. run significantly more smoothly. Undoubtedly I'll be installing quite a few older games, just so that I can crank up the settings and resolution. A productive use of my time, I reckon...

I've just finished my fifth cup of coffee today, and it's almost time to get back to coding..

The past few weeks have been nondescript, nothing really happened, but it wasn't really dull either. Work-wise, things are going well. I've got my own project to work on (mine! all mine!), which I'm aiming to have finished and polished up for the end of the week. I started hacking around with it a few weeks ago, but other distractions meant that I'm only just back into it again this week. The hard bit is already done, which involved some hacking with Managed DirectX to get decent 2D graphics performance. I'm currently building a GUI that has to be an exact clone of a Macromedia Director movie. I'm not even going to consider DirectX for this one, GDI is good enough. When I've got it working - which should really be by the end of the day - I'll start refactoring the hacked together mess that passes for my display application, and tie the two together. When that's all done, we'll deploy my app in place of the current Director application. This is the slightly scary bit, as the current system (up until Sunday afternoon) had a one month uptime, where there were no support callouts. While in theory my app should be more robust, such things can never be taken for granted.

Things have been even less interesting outside work - staying in to watch films, going home early on Friday night, getting to bed at a reasonable time to be up for work in the morning. Yawn.

I ordered some new toys at the end of last month, which are still to arrive. This is to be a much needed upgrade to my desktop at home, which is starting to strain when I'm playing games. Doom 3 just isn't playable at the moment, and Half Life 2 gets a bit choppy if there's anything too spectacular happening. I decided to go 64 bit, as the Athlon 64 has been around for a while now, and is actually affordable now. I'll be getting an Athlon 64 3500+, 1GB of DDR400 RAM, an MSI K8T Neo2 Pro motherboard, and a 120GB Maxtor HD for good measure. I went for socket 939, rather than 754 - which means I'll be able to upgrade to a dual core Athlon 64 if and when they appear. Not that the cost of a new motherboard is going to come close to the price that dual core chips will be going for when they appear. Also worth mentioning is that I chose a motherboard with an AGP slot, rather than PCI-Express. Going the PCI-Express route would mean that I had to buy a new graphics card at the same time, and really, AGP 8x is fast enough for me for the forseeable future.

Anyway, back to work..