I’ve just gone and got myself a new graphics card and monitor for my PC. I thought relying on seven year old technology was perhaps leaving me behind the times a little, so I purchased an Sapphire 9800 Pro graphics card (in a fetching red colour) and a nice LG 17″ TFT monitor (cheers for the reccommendation Simon).

The monitor is an absolute revelation. I knew the old one was on the way out, but I hadn’t realised just how far it had gone. All of a sudden white shows up as white, and I get a full set of greyscales without fading down to black about two thirds of the way down the scale. The colours are pretty damn good too, at least to my untrained eyes.

The video card is pretty sweet too. Its really rather quick (unlike its Catalyst control software, which feels like its running through thick, gloopy treacle) and is happy to go up to ludicrous resolutions should I feel the need to. Maybe its the retrogeek in me, but it seems faintly ridiculous that I should have 128mb RAM on my graphics card. The old one had a grand total of 4mb – and that seemed like absolutely loads at the time.

Now with all this stuff, I thought I’d give online gaming another go. So I fired up Unreal Tournament. Frustrating is the only real word that I can use to describe it. There are now so many new levels, skins, sounds, weapons and other mods out there that you spend more time downloading and installing them than you do actually playing. Then when you do you come up against players who have been practising for far far too long. I think I managed about fifteen seconds without getting killed once.

Sod that then, lets give Battlefield 1942 and Desert Combat a go. That’s more like it. I can play for whole minutes at a time without being killed. Again, people are just far far too good at it, especially those of them who can strafe the Apache gunships quite so well. More practise needed there too methinks. Its ace fun playing it cooperatively though. Myself and my housemate log onto the same server, get onto the same team and then attempt to use teamwork to capture the bases and so on. It rarely works out but its great fun and very rewarding when it does.

So, online gaming exhausted, I thought I’d fire up Photoshop. Huh? What’s this? You mean I’ve got space to have all of the palettes on screen and see all of the image? With only one monitor? Wow.

I’d best quit that before I start getting creative or something.