now that's quiet

Well I got my new power supply unit for my gaming PC and installed it.

I was a little afraid that perhaps it wasn't the PSU that was the problem, so I stood well back when I turned it on. But everything was okay, so the PSU was definitely the problem.

The only shock I had was the noise - this new PSU is virtually silent compared to the old PSU. I think it's a bit of double whammy - this new PSU is a quiet model, but also the old PSU was incredibly loud.

I'd always known my machine was loud - it sounded like a blooming Hoover! - but I'd never realised it was entirely because of the PSU. I've got one of those mega-powerful PCI-E graphics cards in it that's a got a big fan on it (it takes up two slots) and there's the CPU cooler and stuff so I'd assumed all of that was making a large contribution.

Turns out not at all - with the new PSU in and the covers on, it's almost silent :/.

Of course, having regained my PC, guess what I did? Yup, played Anno 1404.

I could have used this as an excellent opportunity to watch some DVDs or do some scanning, but unfortunately, I'm now realising, because I bought as you do (Richard Hammond's book I mentioned earlier in the week) I've been reading that pretty intensely instead.

Ah well - at least this weekend is a bank holiday so at this stage I can con myself into thinking that I'll be utilising the bonus time to do something I should do, like scanning or watching DVDs. I'm sure the reality will be a great big pile of Anno.

I don't think I discussed it on here, but my landlord inquire about me getting cable and basically, virgin said they won't allow two separate accounts at the same address. This seemed very bizarre to me - I mean, what difference does it make how many accounts you have at the same address? Surely it just means they're turning away perfectly good business?

So having go this bad news my landlord came up with the idea of running a cable from his router to my place. I dunno what's happened with this, though, as I've not seen him to ask. I don't like to be pushy with it, because he's basically offering to give it to me for free.

I must admit to also being slightly worried about the practicalities - I'm an extremely high bandwidth user and I wouldn't want to push him over any sort of fair use quota.

In the meantime I've been investigating different broad band deals and phone lines and stuff.

I pay a lot for my broadband, I've always known that. The thing is though, it seems to be you get what you pay for.

Where I am, distance from the exchange wise and line quality wise, I get about 1.5 meg tops. This is pretty much as I'm expecting and all I will ever get, so deals going on about 24 megs and even 8 megs are just no-goers. I will never achieve those sorts of speeds (cable not withstanding).

But also, the line I'm currently on is a business line. This means it has a low contention (25:1 or 30:1 I believe). My experience is that this makes a lot more difference to your speed than anything else.

All non-business broadband I've seen has had contention of 50:1 - so a heck of a lot worse, meaning the speed would be a lot lower during peak times. Peak times are during the day and evening, when I'm either using P2P or doing my general surfing.

Also, as mentioned, I'm a very high bandwidth user. I have a facility for checking how much I've used each month and I've never checked it and seen my monthly usage bellow 100gigs.

That's a lot of bandwidth and the vast majority of ISP's "fair use" policies would be triggered. Indeed, many have stated monthly caps that are way below 100gig.

Basically then, non-business accounts are out.

So what about other business accounts? Well, the ones I can find are essentially either identical to my other account, or, again, they don't offer quite as good a service.

The basic point then is that while I could get broadband a heck of a lot cheaper, I can't get broadband that meets my needs any cheaper.

Unless I get access to cable via John. I may see if I can get hold of him this weekend and see if he's still keen on the idea.

If I could do that I'd be very tempted to dump my landline entirely. I virtually only have it for broadband - certainly I could cope with all my calls being via my mobile phone.

And speaking of phones I may have mentioned my bill had suddenly shot up - it went from £11 a month to £19 a month: nearly double. So I was looking at non-BT deals, but while I was doing so I was also checking the BT site and everything on the site seemed to be saying that although line rental had gone up, it was only by about £1.

I therefore gave them a call and what it seems has happened is that my direct debit for £11 wasn't quite enough to cover the cost of the line. Therefore, some automatic system kicked in and decided that £19 was the value for it be.

This is utterly ridiculous - across 5 years of having the line (so 5 * 12 monthly payment), the entire total of the deficit was £20. And in the space of 4 months paying at £19 I've therefore built up about £16 of credit on the account.

So the woman re-ran the software and it came up with the much more reasonable £12 monthly charge and she also said I can claim back the over-payment, apparently.

Bizarre.