Also a section of Aquilis's code could be 'optimised'...
could be truncated down to

I dont think my code is actually any "faster",
but it is less code... thats all. I just like less code...

It shouldn't be faster because the compiler should do both versions directly with the eax register and not move the value around in a temporary register (but even if it did, moving values between registers is blazing fast on CPUs)