Ho hum… nothing very much to talk about from this past week, I’m afraid. A bit of Lord of the Rings Online, mooching around the Lone-Lands; enjoyable enough, but not terribly anecdote-worthy.

About the most exciting event (for me, at least, it’s not going to get me very far on the after dinner speaking circuit) was deciding it’s time to upgrade my two year old graphics card, an ATI X800XL. As my PC sits in the living room, I’ve tried to make it as quiet as possible (Silent PC Review is a handy place for that), and the X800XL is a passive card with no fan, just a hulking great heatsink on it. Ideally, I was looking out for a passive replacement, but it seems that most of the totally passive cards available don’t offer a huge benefit over the X800XL in terms of performance. Fortunately the Silent PC forums suggest that the stock cooler on the 8800GTS series of cards is actually pretty quiet, and at under £200 they’re pretty reasonable for a high-end card, so one of those should be turning up tomorrow. I’ll see if that’s enough to get the graphics sliders up from “Medium” to “Engage Graphics Mode: EXTREME!” at a sane frame-rate…