The Geek Squad will be confiscating my Power User card shortly

Lately, it feels like I've been on a mission to simplify my life and make it more efficient. Today, I did something I never thought I'd do.

For the past several years, my main desktop computer has been a venerable Shuttle SS51G, one of the classic small form-factor PCs marketed at build-it-yourself types and one of the first to feature an AGP slot for bring-your-own-video. The AGP slot had been home to a BFG Technologies card with an nVidia 5200FX GPU. It was a nice graphics accelerator for games, but I could tell that it made the system run hotter and noisier. The number one game I had been playing on the PC that benefitted from the accelerator was SimCity 4. Since I'm not playing it anymore, that just meant that the system was consuming more power than necessary all the time.

So today I decided to pop that graphics card right out of there. This means I've got the monitor harnessed to the mighty SiS 315 built on the motherboard. That's right, I've decided that onboard video is good enough for the mundane tasks for which I use the computer; my gaming needs are now met with my Nintendo DS and Wii now. The Shuttle box is now cooler, quieter and surely less hungry for watts.

Meanwhile, I wonder if someone who deliberately downgrades his computer's performance can be considered as having lost his techie soul....