15. Relaxation

The doctor told me to relax - totally. "None of this working round the house stuff, no odd jobs here and there, just find yourself something you really like doing and do that for a couple of weeks".
So, on the strength of that, I decided to upgrade my PC and spend some time playing games my 3800X2 can't handle very well. First stop was Ebay, my Abit motherboard has been playing up recently so I thought it might be a good tiime to upgrade from the old AGP standard to the 'new' PCIe. While I was at it, why not get a better CPU - 30 mins of scouting about and I'd selected a 3.4 P4 processor and a rather nice looking MSI motherboard - fire up the old AuctionSniper and bingo - £24 for the P4 and £12.50 for the MSI - well chuffed me as I'd reckoned on about £100 for the pair. So now I thoughd I'd try and get a half decent graphics card as my ancient Geforce 6200 just can't handle the graphics intensive games of the moment. After a lot of humming and ha-ing I opted to try the ATI cards and found myself bidding on a Radeon 1900XT - and then winning for £50 inc postage - woohoo.
I've now got all I need to do the business, so I call on one of my sons mates who is a bit of a whizz at the PC fixing game, grab a few cans of Fosters to help the brainpower (him not me, I prefer wine) and start ripping the old PC apart. By sheer luck the super cooling fan I had for the old skt 939 Abit also fitted my new skt 775 m/board, and within an hour my 'new' PC was up and running and oh boy, is it fast!!!!. We had a hiccup with the old IDE harddrives as for some obscure reason we could not get the BIOS to recognise them, so I whizzed out to my local PC shop and bought a 160Gb SATA drive. For less that £150 I'd got myself a system that costs about £450 complete on Ebay and a damn sight more elsewhere.
Now I'm going to spend time playing some big ol games - Oblivion, F.E.A.R, Farcry and of course Supreme Commander which now runs perfectly. My son is going to get me a copy of Medieval War II which killed my old system everytime and I'm looking forward to that bigtime.