So, "How am I doing?" Here's the picture.....

This may not look like much to you, but this is the test that determines whether or not your computer is able to show you the fancy Aero graphics and transparency features in Windows.

If your score drops below "3" for Graphics, then you're not going to enjoy the fancy effects, and you might as well be running XP Pro, or Millennium, or Windows 98SE. And I can hear you asking, "How would that old coot know the answer to that - he pre-dates the invention of nuclear fission, and he's even older than the electric typewriter!" - Maybe so, but I ain't dead yet, Kiddies, and the reason I know these things is because I spend 'way too much time here playing with my computer, and it's only nine months old. In fact, it's less than nine months old, and already its graphics card has failed this test, and had to be replaced. And even the new one, with twice the built-in memory of the old one, just barely passes the test itself. And it has 512 Mb of memory on it. Just for the benefit of you youngsters out there, my first old Dell Optiplex desktop only had 128 Mb of Ram for the whole chicken-plucking thing. So here's this new graphics card now with four times the memory that my whole first computer had.

"And how long ago was that, Ancient One?" you're asking.... Well, now, Gomer - let me think. It was away back in the good old days of August, 2004. Actually not all that long ago, really. So technology is flying right along. Graphics cards today need more memory than whole PCs did five years ago. So if you're hoping to run a cutting-edge operating system like this soon-to be-released Windows 7, you'd better make sure your hardware is up for it, and just because you just got it a few months back, that doesn't prove a thing. Because - we don't know whether or not the guys who built it stuffed it full of old parts that were left over from the launching of the first space flight to the moon. You just can't leap to conclusions on that. I know, because I learned it the hard way. I bought a new computer that has parts in it which date back to four and five years ago, when we were still thinking of graphics in terms of scratching lines into a soft flat rock..... Any questions?