I'm not entirely sure what a "3DMark" is supposed to represent as a unit of measure. But apparently the difference between my PC running Vista Ultimate and an identical PC running XP Professional is 1500 of them. So Vista's achilles heel continues to be driver support? It's certainly been more troublesome for me than I had hoped, but it's what I get for going with the 64-bit OS. Anyway, last night I installed Futuremark's 3DMark05 synthetic benchmarking tool to see how my machine stacks up against the latest and greatest tech that money can buy. It's funny to look back on how I thought that these demos looked amazing running like a slideshow. And now that my computer can more or less crank them out at 70fps, they're somehow less impressive... It's slightly annoying that when I built this PC I missed some fairly significant price cuts by a matter of weeks. But I've been enjoying being able to play games in high-definition for that period of time. And that's really just the way it goes in the consumer electronics market. The pace of advancement is so rapid there will always be better products or deals just around the corner. My solution is to sort of amortize whatever premium you might unwittingly pay against the enjoyment that you get out of your toys, and that's good enough for me. A better solution might be to keep up with fiscal year calendars, and not buy anything just before the end of quarters. :P I really can't speak highly enough of widescreen PC gaming. It's honestly an entirely new experience. Granted, some older games require a bit of coaxing before they'll display in full 16:9 or 16:10 glory. But I've found an invaluable resource in the Widescreen Gaming Forum. My complaints about Supreme Commander seem silly now; and that was on a 21" 4:3 CRT, which is certainly no slouch when it comes to viewing area. Of course, it also weighed 80 pounds if it was an ounce, and took up about 3 square-feet of desk space.