Some things come along in life that knock you for six. You realise some of the choices you've made have been wrong ones - but no matter how you try to correct things, they don't seem to get any better. In some cases, you can make terrible mistakes, and that leads to making things worse.

Due to some of those bad choices, I ended up with no computer for five days. After 48 hours, I went through cold turkey. It was almost, but not quite, hell. Very soon though, I no longer felt the urge to spend hour upon hour at the keyboard, and for one enlightening moment I realised that I had been addicted to my PC. That enlightenment didn't last long, as I finally managed to get the PC back together and online last night. Within minutes I was back on the Internet researching and reading five days' worth of e-mails.

This whole situation made me realise two things. Firstly, I am a really noisy typist - and I hammer the keyboard quite mercilessly (there is a story about this comment that I might tell you about one day). Secondly, there are far more important things in life than computers. I know that statement is contentious, especially in a computer magazine, but it's true. There really is more to life than sitting at a PC and typing away into the wee small hours. I have rediscovered my friends and family during those five days. I have also managed to get several good nights' worth of sleep. No longer do I type into the early morning, then sleep for four hours just so I can do it all again.

I have also rediscovered my Xbox 360, which sickeningly still has better graphics than my PC. Even with the dual SLI solution. Talking of which, I have been building a PC for a customer that has two Galaxy 7900 GS graphics cards running in SLI mode. In the interests of fairness, I inserted them in my PC and ran a thorough set of benchmarks to see just what they could do. Again, the results were about 33% up on the 7600 GT cards that I normally use, which is quite a mark up. I'll be able to give you more exact readings next week, when I have more time to record my results.

What is interesting is that the hike in performance almost exactly matches the difference in price (as a relative percentage) between the 7600 and the 7900 series graphics cards. This means that, finally, the price differential between the different GPUs is now more relative to the performance of them. Again, this is a good thing because it means the market now truly reflects the performance of each chipset. Pay £80 for a card and you get £80's worth of performance. Of course, there are still some anomalies, but in general the major manufacturers now seem to be pricing things more evenly.

If you have any questions or comments on this column or any of the articles that I have written, then e-mail them to: louis@micromart.co.uk