Laptop recommendations

I'd consider the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 if you're flush. If you're even more flush then get the carbon fibre version. Up until a few months ago I would have been a staunch advocate of a Macbook of some description but my 3rd and 4th Macs are now on their way out, so while the shiny is unprecedented I now seriously question their durability.

I'm in favour.

between two each of PS1, PS2 and PS3, Dreamcast, gamecube, Wii, Xbox, and *5* xbox 360's not to mention 15 years of PC gaming I have acquired literally hundreds of game discs. I have to dedicate an entire 15ft wall of my living room to their storage... all the other walls are occupied by dvd and blu-rays. it's getting ridiculous.

putting aside physical storage space as an issue, I have lost count of the number of games and films I have had to replace over the years due to disc scratches rendering them non functional. (kids).

I am 100% in favour of an optical-driveless next generation xbox, or indeed any other console... I've been a heavy itunes user for tunes and movies for nearly a decade and have never encountered a problem - I once lost my entire itunes collection when both the iMac and the backup hard disks were destroyed by fire - out of pocket? No. I contacted itunes customer services and within 6 hours my entire download history of everything i had ever bought was available in my download queue for me to redownload. took days, but no biggy.

likewise, an xbox died (rrod) - able to download every xbox live purchase again, for free to my new console.

physical media is anachronistic... all I can do is hope they put a sufficiently large hard disk in the new xbox so that I don't have to consider an eventual upgrade as I did xmas time - replacing an original 20gb xbox premium with the 320gb call of duty modern warfare xbox - purely because I had no space left on the disk and literally nothing I could delete.

at the end of the day, lack of optical drive isn't really an issue for me, if i want a disc player i'll buy a dvd player ~£30 for a half decent one, or £70-100 for a reasonable blu-ray player... or, it might actually motivate me to buy the decent blu-ray player i've been thinking about for a while - perhaps something from arcam, to do my plasma telly justice.

£500 would be reasonable if...

... This was a 32"+ set as you can easily pay £500 for a high quality 32" HDTV, with what I would call "decent quality" sets available at around £300. nonetheless I'm going to give this strong consideration for one of the kid's bedrooms.

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

what's the betting that $300 == £300?

I don't think so somehow.

Think I'll stick with my two (soon to be three) shiny new Apple TV's. they arrived thursday, took approx two mins each to plug in and set up before they were streaming video. they work perfectly as advertised. they're simple enough to use that my [extremely] technologically challenged fiance and step-son could use them without me even telling them what to do.

++iTunes store recently introduced a price cut on films, now everything's £1 less than it used to be, so on average a new chart title is approx £4 cheaper than the DVD equivalent from <insert supermarket chain of your choice here>

hmm

I've got to be honest, if the iTunes store had HD movie downloads (to own, not rent) I'd not be buying blu-rays at all. as it is, I have about 60 of them. I've stopped buying dvd's altogether.

About 75% of my media purchases now are TV series'. All from iTunes and in HD if available. The other 25% are movies, mostly on blu-ray, but the rest again from iTunes.

TBH i'm not amused with everyone pushing video streaming as the way to go. I'd rather pay for something and own it. I tend to watch stuff over and over, might be years apart, but nevertheless, I still watch it again.

I can well believe that a card like this makes the difference...

back in the pre-broadband days I had that BT home ISDN product I can't remember what it was called and it's too early to be googling) and I had to buy ISDN cards for my gaming PC's. I had two identical computers and initially bought some no-name ISDN card from (I think) Dabs.com.

I was initially satisfied with the connection to the likes of TFC, it being a vast improvement over POTS dial-up I was using before. As i started to get into clan matches and the like though, and playing on custom 32 player servers I was noticing lag spikes and such more often and a friend suggested an Eicon Diva ISDN card... at the time it was a good £70 which I thought was extortion, my cards having set me back £10 or so including delivery, but I had a job and I was *really* into my TFC so I thought what the hell and bit the bullet.... made a tremendous difference...

Year or two later I experienced the same thing when I went from a built in ethernet connection on the motherboard to a separate NIC in my new gaming PC.

I would definitely consider one of these or a similar product if I was actually using a gaming PC these days (as it is, I now do almost all my gaming via PS3 and XBOX 360, only playing WoW / BC on my late 2008 Macbook Pro - which incidentally cost more than any gaming PC I have ever bought in my life - and has better stability + maccy goodness :p)

I can think of one..

with bluetooth and infrared it'd make an ideal learning remote. highly customisable touchscreen interface, maybe a logitech harmony downloadable app. or apple could just beef up their existing remote app.

so many possibilities :>