Today is my birthday. I am 35 years old. If I were a tree I’d have many, many rings!

My husband bought me a new desktop computer as a combined birthday/Christmas present, largely because my laptop was having significant trouble dealing with the upgraded Wrath of the Lich King graphics. (You may or may not remember that I’ve been using my laptop as my main and only machine since my desktop blew up earlier this year.)

The laptop has a tendency to overheat anyway, and even after turning all the settings all the way down, plus propping the laptop up on a wire stand and aiming a desk fan at it, it still just shuts down completely once or twice a day. Inconvenient when I am fighting, and downright rude when I am trading. (And the fan makes it hard to hear the game, not to mention the phone.)

The graphics card I had from my old desktop machine is still a very nice card (it’s a GeForce 7800GT) and we always have hard drives and network cards and whatnot lying around, so my birthday present was a fairly inexpensive barebones box. (And it came with Windows XP! Hooray!) I spent much of last night setting it up, but I still have a ways to go before I am completely operational. I’m still missing most of my development environment, for instance.

I can say right now, though, that even Undercity looks absolutely fabulous with a real video card and all the settings turned up. It makes a huge difference.