Shut up and take my money!

stop being so pre-disposed with speed, weight and cost, its a Leccy DeLorean!!! how is that EVER a problem?

Now add a Mr Fusion and it will be perfect.

Well I would have been on Talk Talk fibre if they hadn't been so difficult with me when I rang

Currently a Pipex customer (already moved to talk talk's network) I rang them up when the website said Fibre was now available for upgrade

After passing me between Pipex and Talk Talk upgrade departments a few times, they decided they would have to put in a new line, (some excuse about an incompatible line package) and then they had the nerve to tell me I must be a customer with them 3 months before being eligible to take the fibre upgrade.

Needless to say I signed up with BT, it goes in on Friday....wish me luck :)

actually a great company to get some high end kit from

Medion re-brand some MSI laptops at cheap prices

the high end gaming range is certainly worth a look, with the only noticable alteration being Blue lighting instead of red.

I know I am considering something with a mobile GTX460 on board.

the standard comment of "business as usual" won't last, it never does, just look at how much the quality of e-machines laptops have improved since the Gateway>>>Acer buyouts.

there is a lot of hate for electric vehicles on here

but I for one will reserve judgement until I have had the chance to test drive one.

The focus 1.6 Diesel is one of the most economical cars in it's class, so a comparison between the two would be interesting.

No word on price yet, so who is to say that it will be expensive?

Likely in the first year of sale it may be, but I can see these things becoming much cheaper in the not too distant future.

and as for Microsoft doing the software, they have done a pretty good job with windows 7, and as with anything security holes are going to be found, as we tell our clients, the only sure fire way of being completely unhackable is not to connect to the web.

there that's my tuppence worth :)

same old same old

Netbooks are way too samey, the dual core one is nice, but pretty much the same spec as every other dual core netbook

and the single core version will offer nothing more than a cheap bottom of the range 10" netbook for £200

they need to start wowing us with what is possible , lets see faster processing, more ram as standard please too, I mean 2GB minimum really.

Bigger storage and possibly better graphics, plenty of exciting stuff out there and on the way.

Moved from AVG a while back

AVG 2011 slowed my gaming pc to a frustrating crawl, increating boot time, and the time it took to launch browsers.

they really do need to take a look at themselves and realise they dont have to be Symantec.

The linkscanner is pretty good, though and you can run that alongside another product to keep things streamlined.

I have moved to MSE for the time being.

Had to recover a customers pc from this, although in his case we could get into safe mode, go figure. Uninstalled AVG, restarted, everything fine, installed MSE until AVG fix things.

pales in comparison

to the Ginetta G50 EV :)

and yes its a rebadged mesed up VW

fairly nice though

agreeing with other posters here

yes the numeric keypad is a godsend, even as a home user, adding stuff up, inputting numbers into hobby related applications (bowling league software for one) makes having a numeric keypad a must.

and as for the looks...whats wrong with it? it looks like it is meant to , it doesnt have any snazzy colours, or led's all over the place, but its pretty sleek, the keyboard is very comfortable having tried a similar design.

And its performance is upper mid-range, so the price isnt the worst either.

add to that the fact that Toshiba laptops for the main part are pretty rugged, it should last a good while.

Other manufacturers may make lighter better looking machines but the build quality isnt as good.

right I am off to get some Humbrol paints to make my Samsung more interesting :)

Played the demo

and I must say I am impressed, its was a Pick up and play RTS, and I am one of those who only just managed to get to grips with C&C Generals :)

very engaging, I would hope this gets a good multiplayer following

its on my Christmas list, and knowing Steam will be at an awesome price for pc during December at some point :)

until of course

your ipad/androidpad buyer realises that his shiny device does less than the uber cheap netbook sat on the coffeetable,

the "pad" devices are nice but just a little short of what they need to be,

I myself still like keyboards a great deal.

and in my business I have found people migrating back to desktop pc's from portable devices because desktops are cheaper and last longer.

there ya go , my whole tuppence! :)

That spec is fine

for what most people would use that system for

dont forget any Gamer of any note at all would want a seperate keyboard and mouse, like razer or logi products to play any modern game.

for emulation and "casual" gaming, the ion2 is fine, in fact I had Race Driver Grid running on an ion1 system with an Atom330 2gb ram and a 320gb hdd.

the only downside is that the keyboard will have to be different , but I could live with that

I will put my name down for one :)

awesome caption

YOW! indeed

poached inmates all round then?

reminds me of superman 3 with that wonderful homebuild PC's security system :)

the main problem

is Virgin stopped spreading properly

there are exchanges that really need some competition

available on the GRF exchange for example

BT, AOL ( really? ), Orange (I am sure I read they dont want to do it anymore)

and one of the many Talk Talk owned companies, so Talk Talk

to two real choices and not great ones at that.

So we cannot get SKY cool packages, or virgins packages , as there is no cable running uphill for some reason.

Rant over, now point me to an isp that works :)

Now that is gorgeous

What an awesome looking player

if they made a phone version too, it would be so tempting.

Sony do seem to be improving a lot of their product lines recently.

tweeting scales

I suppose that explains the glut of "Fat Bitch" tweets appearing :)

Mine's the Bathrobe

just waiting for the moaning to begin

all the "l33t" mooners ;) will be having a go at cosmonauts camping in craters :)

Hang on a minute, whats with all this buy new kit rubbish?

Red/Green 3d the old style works fine on old tv's

Polarised glasses will also work on normal tv's (anyone seen the 3d advert on their normal telly and tried some cinema specs?)

The shutter glasses need to match the .Hz frequency of the TV, a while back I read it was 120Hz or something for a decent image.

I tried the Nvidia ones at a gaming expo last year, and got a headache, I never get headaches with polarised ones so I was not too impressed.

The source is where the main processing of 3d will take place, why on earth would 3d need processing twice? (at the Blu-Ray and then at the tv?) the tv is just displaying the pixels thrown at it.

I will reserve judgement for people trying 3d content on normal tv's especially since many boast greater than 200Hz!

anyway thats just my tuppence worth :)

Thought this was a PC Desktop Fan :)

200 quid, well I suppose its only like buying a dualit toaster! :)

yes I originally thought of a fantastic new way to cool my "Fryup all round" Phenom II 965BE

then again maybe a steadier airflow would suit it.

hit 76C today when testing Bad Company 2 :)

now back to the footie :)

going to add my tuppence :)

If I can afford it, I will buy it :)

there is always room for a new platform to develop, they dont even need to be backward compatible in my opinion.

Its a 2.5 horse race at the moment with OSX Windows and Linux

(I am not going to specify the .5 :) )

So an extra platform is exciting, just as it was in the 80's and 90's, and awesome idea would be for the Amiga to be the ultimate cross platformer. running Mac Linux and Windows software right out of the box... its got to be possible :)

meh gets beaten easily

for £150 less you can get yourself an ION system that has Blu-Ray, Surround Sound, Optical Audio, Wireless.n, and with upgradeable compontents (2gb to 4gb) upping the 320gb HDD to a larger drive or even two drives in Raid 0 or 1.

Of course Apple's marketing hype machine will probably sell a few to their 'enlightened' customers :)

Its a shame really

Back in the day when they bounced in with the i740 cards they were awesome

ran games on an 8mb card that required a 16mb card. Kept up astonishingly , with few driver updates and a very stable platform.

Intel had such an awesome graphics prospect but let it go.

And only having this two horse race in the GPU market isnt all that brilliant.

as usual a great way to end a Friday :)

Love it

I would describe some methods I knew of forcing upgrades but then I would have to post as A/C! :)

all fine and dandy but....

where are the Flippin DVB-T2 usb adapters eh?

I have a media centre so there is less garbage under my telly!

Ha! politicians and technology

Be it long range wireless microphones

twitter

or passing a bill through parliament they don't truly understand

its a wrong mix isn't it?

El Reg should start a 'Techno Party' , they will get voted in by sensible I.T. types

but also get the raving chav vote as they will miss the point but want to fire the manifesto through their Saxo's Bass bins. :)

hope you are going to review more units.

Missed out the ION330HT proper media centre , surround sound, DVDRW or BLU-Ray combo drives available

super quiet, not much bigger than a Wii.

They may only be 1st Gen ION but are available at reasonable prices.

hang on

System Protection, what about AVG/Avast etc?

and for image editing with extremely powerful tools, you only have to overcome your fear of typing in "those" words into google and grab GIMP!

it is good to inform of free apps but there is a much bigger choice, you could possibly have done a list for each category.

Strange

I dont seem to be able to understand what this Vortigon in front of me is saying...

mine's the one with the help hints on how to finish that strider bit on EP2

picky about memory

Well its an Acer so yes it is picky as a cheap 266 chipset socket a motherboard from pc chips :)

looks nice though, needs to stand up against lenovo's offering.

scary stuff indeed

I am looking at some serious cost just to accommodate a work experience student

I am also a one man business, looking to expand staff to grow the company, but its looking a little difficult.

may be more of an option to take on a business partner to work alongside.

but thats more expensive than

ION330HT!!!

www.localbitsltd.co.uk

which has 7.1 audio out and hdmi out

and 6 usb's , wireless.n built in

yeah yeah I know, I am shameless :)

Very cool

I would have one just for bragging rights in my gaming rig.

would be nice ot have a 4Ghz cpu though :)

just waiting for the usb's

yes I am selling those lovely little ASRock boxes

and as soon as the DVB-T2 usb thingies appear I shall be pairing them up with a choice of DVD or BluRay system with windows 7 :)

sorry for the advert but subs free tv is the future, and having a box that will then be able to do all that internet streaming tv of the future is a good investment :)

performance is bad because

HP et al, take standard components and fiddle around with them so as a consumer you have to go back to them for future support/upgrades

its like Packard Bell tattooing hard drive bios'

and moving a row of pins for the usb connector in a standard gigabyte board so that you can't just replace broken usb ports without rewiring the connector.

I recently repaired an HP machine which had stability issues from day 1, the single drive system had a default bios configuration for RAID.

nuff said :)

Love it

its simply awesome, annoying mac fanbois is usually pretty easy, but that is ammunition not to be missed.

on another note, newsreaders etc love to have the odd tablet machine, and of course they need full functionality (pc wise) so they could use that dumb client on machines to look nice on telly! :)

@Brian Witham

Yes but if you asked him to bring back flight simulator, he would probably just demonstrate the aerodynamics of that macbook :)

right now back to installing osx on my C64

As said before Nothing New

Dell have done this for years,

I cancelled an order for an M15X after repeated delays, and different components being out of stock, some that I was told were previously already in my build....so they take some of my bits to build someone else's machine?

My thoughts are that they like to buy components at a certain bulk level to get a certain price point, which then secures their profit margin.

So high end systems generally get less orders, so they wait until they have 500 or 1000 orders for a certain component before going to their suppliers.

and Yes the quality of Dell products does vary, but to give them their dues, Business support is pretty good, its just end consumers that get the raw deal, and when you look at it that way, its pretty much the same across the board, Acer, HP and others have terrible support for your average joe, but do backflips for a corporate caller.

Time to support your small vendors guys , local people who give you personal face to face support and don't string you along with a big bunch of excuses.

I am not worried

all I need is a crowbar and a pal named Barney

its good but

I have been using this for a while now, first the RC and now the Signature Edition (LOL)

anyway

installation was on to a new system not an upgrade, I have never been a fan of upgrades, too many horror stories to risk it, and theres nothing like a good backup to help clean out stuff you dont want on your active system anymore.

Installation was quick about 25 minutes on a Phenom II X2 550 3.1ghz, 4gb 1600mhz Ram and 2x 750gb 7200RPM Sata II drives in Raid 0 (finally I can install raid drivers from a usb stick :) )

so its great I have even managed to get some old games working that XP didnt want to play with after SP2.

My only gripe is that some of the network (wireless) drivers are not completely stable yet

Ralink PCI cards being the worst, at least I have a good connection from my Philips 80211n dongle.

With the .n ralink card I would get steadily more and more network dropouts, and timeouts, just running pings identified packet loss to both internet and router even though the card showed as connected with full 5 bars signal.

All in all a great improvement over vista, and imho equal to XP but with new features and ready for the future, oh and 64bit, I could never get all the stable drivers I needed for xp64 so gave up.

always a Tom Baker fan

so its good to see him realised as pretty much the best doctor there :)

one of the scariest ones for me was the T-Baker one with the vampires, sorry I am not quite nerdy enough to remember the titles, but the big spaceship as a stake was a smashing idea :)

The recent one where Jon Simms plays the master wsa also amazingly great

especially as he carries off that not very sane thing really well! :)

Its not all bad

64bit

there, on windows7 it works and it works well, so businesses who would like to do stuff that works better in 64bit (big zip files for a starter), will probably want something their users are more familiar with.

Since a lot of end users migrated to laptops (as did I for 4 years :) ) and as we know a laptop often lasts only 2 years in a normal household, many people will be getting their mitts on win 7 sooner as it will be pre-installed, and of course a lot of people currently stuck with vista , because they dont have the knowledge to reinstall, will be looking for an easy upgrade because they know vista is erm.... not very good.

to retraining users wont be such a massive problem

and there are benefits from moving forward, if we didnt have progression there would still be old men with combovers and clipboards telling us what to do..............hang on , thats the council isnt it? :)

Ah memories

Yes where is the unscratchable cd?,

I am sure I remember an episode that had computer communications (modems) in it.

and about how the world will be this big free place where everyone can talk electronically to everyone else.

Obviously providing you are in the right region.

Black helicopters because its all about control in the end...

since apk can drivel

I can probably get away with adding to my post from earlier,

Yesterday was a lan party (see "friends") :)

my win7 pc was the bestest ever at hosting games.

dont knock me, 'puters would be boring without games.

anyway since running 7 rc1, fellow players have commented on the faster loading times of hosted games, as well as more stable running.

so its cool

I am sat using it now.

and yes I will probably end up eating M$ ass but hey, Its a free country (well almost)

I see , I see

so el reg want to reduce the number of applicants so they can host one themselves, although they only have 8 friends :(

Personally I think its a great idea, the fact that a free copy of windows 7 is up for grabs, is great for a start I would happily spend 20 quid on the latest special offer beer at the local supermarket, or even post the party as BYOB

and yes I am a geek and proud, I also have more than 9 friends,

I am duly signed up and waiting for Mr Ballmer to show up and throw my chairs around , wow what a party trick :)

Obviously fake but funny

You can't complain, these videos also might alert some of the more, how shall I say, cerebrally challenged individuals who fall for the scams, to idenify how ridiculous the "offers" are.

plus viral marketing is way better than insurance and lawyer adverts ( as they are the only ones putting out tv adverts anymore, haven't you noticed? :) )

so I say more please, I want Obi to respond trying to get James to ignore the "mere woman" oh the possibilities :)

oh and thats a new Razer Lycosa keyboard you owe me because of that badge :)