Faster tban a speeding...

Snail. OK so I'm being hard but not as hard as a lot of people.

Some time ago a good friend sold me (for a nominal fee) a graphics card he no longer wanted. It is one of the Matrox twin head range. If you haven't used this sort of setup believe me it's hard to go back to one screen. Initially, I had the original 17" CRT that came with the PC and I also had a spare 15" CRT. The setup was great.

Then a few months later a friend of my father-in-law asked for some advice. He was having great trouble with this new computer he had bought. The screen wasn't very stable. At first I suspected the monitor but then discovered that he had bought a new Philips one and the same happened on that. Dismissing the usual favourite explanation of sunspots I realised after further questioning that he lived very near to some high voltage electricity lines. I recommended that he buy an LCD panel as at the time they were just about becoming decent. This solved his problem. As a thankyou he very kindly gave me the (brand new) Philips monitor. So I then had two 17" CRT's attached to my computer. The huge amount of space they occupy was completely offset by the screen real estate.

Xmas 2004 my wife bought me Half Life 2 as a present. We had both enjoyed the original but what she hadn't realised was that our computer was then about 5 years old and there was no way you could play this game on it. We bought a new PC to play the game. The machine we bought has on board graphics which by definition aren't brilliant but were sufficient to play the game. Of course this meant that the twin monitor setup went out of the window. I got a lot of ear bending about this. Each time I explained we needed a Graphics card and each time we couldn't afford a decent one that would do what we wanted.

Just before Xmas 2005 the same friend who sold me the graphics card got me hooked on World of Warcraft. After a suprising amount of persuasion my wife had a go and she is now much more hooked than me. Occasionally the graphics are a bit jerky which I just put down to bandwidth and server use as it only seemed to happen where there were a lot of other characters around. Then we went to visit my wife's brother. He had it on his laptop. It was at that point my wife realised that the graphics on his laptop were massively better than on our machine. At the same time I realised that the jerkiness was probably to do with the frame rate. All of a sudden we had the money to buy a new Graphics card but only if it would support two monitors.

These days supporting two monitors is quite a common thing for a graphics card which meant I was spoiled for choice. The whole graphics card market is a nightmare. There are all sorts of subtle differences at all sorts of price points. In the end I decided that I would let someone else make the decision for me. I decided to contact Overclockers. In the back of my mind I knew I had heard of them before. I explained my requirements - two monitors, a bit of video editing, two games and it must be AGP as my machine doesn't support PCI Express. Given that PCI Express is starting to take off I figured that the price of AGP cards would start to rise so I should buy now with one eye on the future. They suggested the XFX GeForce 6600 GT 128MB DDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (AGP). After doing some research on it I decided that it was a decent purchase and it was about as future proof as I could get. Not only could I overclock it should I choose to but it could support two DVI-I monitors should I replace the CRT's.

I placed my order and it was duly acknowledged. When I placed it my wife was in the room and gave me her credit card, so I put it in her name. For us this is a fairly normal practice. I then put my work address for delivery. Big mistake! A day or two later I got an email saying that they could only deliver to the cardholders address do to the cost of the card. If I didn't acknowledge this email via their webnote system within 7 days the order would be cancelled. I was minorly annoyed at this as we both work and so delivering to home means that one of us has to take a day off. In my note I asked if the card could be delivered to a neighbour when the poor delivery guy discovered we weren't in. Fortunately they said yes.

It was at this point I decided to do some research on Overclockers. It didn't take long to discover a lot of unhappy customers. I guess that with the Internet this is pretty much the norm but was starting to get worried. Next day I had heard nothing so left another webnote which again was auto-acknowledged. By now it was Wednesday and the card should have been delivered on Monday or at the latest Tuesday. To my knowledge it wasn't even ready to go to the courier. On Thursday I got an email to say that it had been prepared for delivery and I got a link to the couriers site that was supposed to show the status of the parcel. When I clicked on this it said there was no such package. I happened to check again today (friday) and was relieved to see that the parcel was on it's way. When I got home there was a card to say that it was delivered to a neighbour. I write this while waiting for my wife to finish her WoW session so I can install the card.

In summary, well done Overclockers, you were as good as your word. It took longer than ideal to deliver but I can see that this is probably a security issue.