Surfing forums is bad for your health, and ego.

I was just surfing the WoW forums, trying to figure out why my 9800GT lags in game sometimes, and I come across people arguing (on the internet? never). "Why wouldn't a 9800GT run WoW at max settings on a crazy high resolution?" they say. "Are you dumb? I've got a [insert 5 year old card] and I can run it at max!" others say. And then there's the "just buy two GTX280s and you'll be set" crowd. I can't help but ask why. My 9800GT is overclocked and it can't keep up in starter zones at highest settings. Why does that make me feel so inadequate?

Anyway. Swapped a few hard drives around, made some backups, and bit the bullet (why do people still say that?). I reformatted my Server 2008 installation and installed Windows 7. Again.

This time it took 20 minutes from inserting the disk to a pretty desktop. And, now on my shiny SATA drive, my Experience Index Score went up. It was a 5.5 before, now it's a 5.9. This time the lowest score is a tie between gaming graphics and disk performance. Somehow, that feeling of inadequacy still remains. I guess it's time to invest in a Phenom II, another 4GB of ram, and a GTX295. Or I can eat for a few months.

I tried to install 7 on my laptop last night, to round out my testing of the OS. It failed. Apparently 256MB of RAM is not enough. It wouldn't get past the "Loading Files" part. It would finish, but then just hang until I'd get impatient half an hour later and hard reset it. Oh well, RAM is cheap these days, I'll have to buy another GB stick for it. My last one went bad just two weeks ago.