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Post by antharro on Nov 22, 2006 4:35:50 GMT
Damnit, I only just read this thread... these are my absolute most favorite mainline trains. I think tubechallenger is absolutely correct that SWT will be ridiculed for this rather stupid move...
444s are okay, but there's nothing like a 442 for a comfortable Bournemouth - Waterloo journey. They make the journey an enjoyable experience.
*sigh* First it was the slammers, now the 442s. I swear all the good trains are being withdrawn.
Does anyone know what the plan for them will be?
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Post by antharro on Oct 17, 2006 2:05:35 GMT
Mmm, there's some interesting ideas there! Digital camera - I already have one of these. (extra pic - click!) I've always wondered about an electric toothbrush, but I'm still a fan of doing it the hard way and can't quite make myself convert! Don't need to buy porn, there's plenty for free on the 'net! ;D The pint mug is very cool, and definately on the shortlist. And the binary watch is also most definately on the shortlist! I've actually been considering one of these, having seen them in various places both online and off, and I have a feeling Cyberdog do their own model. But I'm not quite sure I could put up with the "geek" label that goes with owning one! Hmm, Cyberdog. When I have a decent amount of money around...! Thanks for all the suggestions! ;D
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Post by antharro on Oct 15, 2006 3:36:45 GMT
I'm in the mood for buying some shiney new electronic gadget. Or a good book. Here's the rules: - Don't need an MP3 player, bluetooth headset, or mobile phone.
- Don't need an extra hard drive, graphics card, DVD burner or RAM.
- Don't need a set-top DVD recorder, or freeview box.
- Must have a practical use. Nothing that's shiney just for the sake of it.
...and most importantly: Max price £80 (incl vat, ex delivery) Any ideas?
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Post by antharro on Sept 26, 2006 1:08:24 GMT
I've been with Hastings Direct since I was 18 (24 now). When I first joined, they beat anyone else I was calling by several hundred pounds.
1 litre VW Polo, £1300 third party fire & theft, anyone? Hastings took that down to £750 for me, which while still expensive, was the cheapest quote I found in days of hunting.
They've been taken over since then, so I don't really know what they're like anymore. Their legal team was quite good when I was involved in an accident a couple of years back (other driver admitted fault).
Worth a look.
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Post by antharro on Sept 22, 2006 15:47:28 GMT
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Post by antharro on Aug 10, 2006 4:30:43 GMT
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Post by antharro on Jun 25, 2006 0:31:18 GMT
I run Windows Vista and it runs slowly on an Intel P4 3GHz, 1GB RAM machine. Mmm, it runs okay on an Athlon64/3200 with 1Gb RAM. It's very obviously beta - there's lots of little bugs and flaws I wouldn't like to see in a final edition. There are actually viruses available for OS X, so it's not entirely virus-free.
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Post by antharro on Jun 21, 2006 3:34:39 GMT
Nope, niether of those - but I have been using the explorer 7 beta for a while now. I do like the tabbed browsing they've introduced with it. Yeah, tabbed browsing's an excellent idea. Been around for a while tho - Firefox and Opera have had it for a good while, not sure about Safari on the Mac. There have been different browsers released for the PC (CrazyBrowser comes to mind) that have had tabs and use Internet Explorer as their "engine", (think of it as a different interface for the same browser) but it's good that MS have finally caught up. Vista is quite different to XP (not at all like the difference between 2000 Pro and XP), takes some getting used to. I'm a partial insomniac and have rubbishy sleeping patterns anyway; what's your excuse for being up this late/early!?
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Post by antharro on Jun 21, 2006 2:26:58 GMT
Anyone here running the official beta of Windows Vista? Or Office 2007?
Comments?
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Post by antharro on May 2, 2006 17:14:02 GMT
National Geographic channel, (sky 526) 9pm tonight. Repeated on NatGeo+1 (sky 527) at 10pm.
Seconds From Disaster
Kings Cross Fire: A carelsssly discarded match caused the worst fire in London Underground's history, killing 31 people. How did this small fire erupt into a deadly fireball?
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Post by antharro on Mar 3, 2006 22:08:04 GMT
Phil - you probably have a mainboard with the "nForce" chipset on it - this controls various other components on the board.
It also requires drivers. nVidia release a combined "Unified" driver which contains, amungst other drivers, a sound driver. The current version of the Unified driver is 5.10, _but_ the sound driver it contains is 4.42.
As you've obviously been to nVidia's website, you've found the latest version of the audio-only driver is 4.62, which is a later version than the audio driver included in the Unified driver.
In short terms - 5.10 is the "umbrella" version number of the package of drivers, but within that package, the audio driver is 4.42.
As for uninstalling nVidia's drivers before reinstalling them, I have honestly never bothered unless I've been having problems. I just install the newer versions on top and Windows tends to sort itself out. But, if you really want to uninstall the old versions first, you'll find them (as has been suggested) in Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel.
Please be careful that you don't uninstall the Unified driver tho, as doing this then installing _just_ the sound and video drivers will not allow your system to function at 100%. I'd really just suggest loading the new drivers on top - never given me any problems, to be perfectly honest.
Hope this helps!
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Post by antharro on Jan 21, 2006 16:06:33 GMT
Thanks for the replies. Didn't think I could, but thought it was worth asking anyways.
Young Person's railcard isn't recognized by Oyster yet, so I'll have to stick to using paper tickets on LU as well for the time being.
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Post by antharro on Jan 21, 2006 5:34:38 GMT
I'm gonna be up in London from the 31st for a few days, and will need to pop over to Ware for a couple of days. Can I use my Oyster card on this journey (from Liverpool Street), or do I need to get a paper ticket?
Thanks!
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Post by antharro on Jan 16, 2006 10:26:17 GMT
Happy Birthday, Dave! Hope it's a good one!
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Post by antharro on Dec 26, 2005 0:18:52 GMT
Excellent link, David, thanks!
A great shame we don't still have Routemasters down here now; they'd go lovely alongside the Leylands for the tourist runs, and even just in general day to day duties.
Still, the price of progress... at least we don't have bendy-buses! (...yet!)
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Post by antharro on Dec 25, 2005 21:04:20 GMT
Hmm. Well, Yellow Buses had a number of these fellas: -clicky-They used them on the University routes until they lost the contract to Wilts & Dorset. Saw one out a week or so ago on a Tescos "special" run. Or Sainsburys, I don't remember. I really don't remember seeing routemasters down here. We mostly have these: -clicky-And the other bus company around here, Wilts and Dorset have: -clicky--clicky-and more recently, these: -clicky-The Yellows seem to keep those older buses for the summer as they're good tourist buses for the open-top coast tours. Still, I remember when W&D mostly used Metroriders - many hours spent on these buses coming back from school. [ -clicky- ]
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Post by antharro on Dec 25, 2005 4:55:01 GMT
Clicky. Read the item description... I've lived in Bournemouth my entire life (24 years) and I have never seen a Routemaster down here! Anyone fill me in on this? Were there more, or just one? And if they were around here, how the heck have I managed to miss seeing them?
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Post by antharro on Dec 23, 2005 4:11:10 GMT
Ok, it was Russia, not China. News24 just ran the story.
And they're dumping trucks into a river to try and dam the flow and hold back the pollution... Intriguing way of doing things...
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Post by antharro on Dec 23, 2005 3:54:55 GMT
I caught the tail end of a news program on TV a day or so ago. The story was of the cadmium spill in China, and I'm sure I saw a digger pushing a big truck into a river... am I imagining it? I've had a dig around the various news sites, and even a few China sites, but not come up with anything even remotely close. And if I'm not imagining it, what's the point of pushing a truck into a polluted river? *confused*
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Post by antharro on Dec 8, 2005 2:27:58 GMT
Mmm, tabbed browsing is a good thing (tm). And Firefox 1.5 is pretty good too, rounds the edges of the old 1.07. I use IE6SP1 for Windows Updates, or more correctly "Microsoft Updates" and website testing, and that's it. Firefox gets everything else, and Opera gets a look in occasionally.
As for Windows and memory handling, well, it's not good. Then again, I work with AthlonX2 4800+s with 4Gb RAM, so you tend not to notice memory leaks unless they make the system crash hard!
I'm a fan of tabs, but Chris..... 40 tabs?!!?! ;D
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Post by antharro on Dec 4, 2005 23:02:58 GMT
There's some good advice in this thread. I'll just add, if you're not running any anti-virus software, AVG is free and I highly recommend it. free.grisoft.com
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Post by antharro on Dec 4, 2005 18:30:49 GMT
Eh. Napster's okay. iTunes is also okay, but if you're a real audiophile, the sound quality isn't as good as you might want. Alan - you might want to take a look at Cheetah Audio Converter - link. Recommended by my very favorite Personal Computer World Magazine (nothing to do with PC World!!!!).
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Post by antharro on Dec 4, 2005 18:22:09 GMT
Ok, gonna crawl out of my shell for a while and see what happens.
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Post by antharro on Nov 27, 2005 2:02:52 GMT
Hi all,
I'm having a load of personal issues at the moment which are sometimes making it hard to just do day to day stuff. I need to get myself straight again, so I'm taking a step back from the forum until I'm a little closer to being back on solid ground.
I still hope to make the Christmas meet.
Thanks, Dave
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Post by antharro on Dec 5, 2005 4:22:25 GMT
*blink* All this talk of my Sky box working well has jinxed the hell out of it. I've been watching TV most of tonight while working on a few PCs, and the sound's been very occasionally cutting out, and the picture too, once or twice. Then... it literally switched itself off! ie, total shutdown then start up agin. (I have it hooked up to my sound system and you can tell by the "pops" just what it's doing - pops when it shuts down, pops when it powers up again, pops when it goes to standby...) How very very odd.
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Post by antharro on Dec 4, 2005 18:44:31 GMT
That Sky+ box most likely has torx screws holding it together - T10 size, I think. Maplin and Screwfix sell the relevant screwdriver, otherwise your local hardware store should sell em. Or if you wanna be slightly cheaper, I find my electric tester screwdriver or various jewellers screwdrivers workswith a lot of torx screws! If you were thinking about changing the hard drive, you might find this useful. If it's been overheating, I might want to take out the drive, hook it up to my PC and run something like MHDD over it to check it's okay, see if it's got any bad sectors, etc. Otherwise, a good cleaning and a drop of oil should sort out the fan, unless it's really really died!
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Post by antharro on Nov 27, 2005 1:48:43 GMT
Simple. Pop the cover off the box, remove old drive, replace with suitable new drive. Actually, it's not quite that simple. You have to use a specific model of drive or it won't work at all. There's a lot of conflicting information on the internet, so beware if you choose to go data hunting. Personal Computer World magazine ran an article on this a few months back. I'll have a dig thru my collection and see if I can find it. You could also pay these guys some money to do it for you, but they're asking an awful amount of money compared with the amount you could DIY it for.
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Post by antharro on Nov 26, 2005 22:07:16 GMT
Ack, I completely forgot about this thread! Ok, to answer in turn... solidbond, it sounds to me as if you might just have a hard drive that's got a bunch of bad sectors. Then as soon as you format it again, it marks all the bad sectors so they're not used, but the drive develops a whole bunch of new bad sectors, and so the problem starts again. citysig - Interesting how different people get different experiences of different companies. I had some very bad experences with BT about 8 or 9 years ago, spent hours on the phone to them, really couldn't stand them then. But since then, they've been pretty good to me - even relaid all the cable from my house to the green box at the top of the road when I had an ongoing problem with noise on the line. As a phone provider I've not had any issue with them since. Wouldn't touch then with a bargepole as an internet provider. Had to sort some problems out for a neighbour - spent at least 30 minutes on hold every time I needed to call them about anything at all, passed from department to department, enough to make you scream. Then move to another ISP... atearlscourt - Mine's the Amstrad box. No problems here!
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Post by antharro on Nov 22, 2005 2:04:50 GMT
solidbond - which version of the Sky+ box do you have? Some of the earlier ones are notoriously buggy. This one: --clicky--Is one of the more stable ones. An ex girlfriend had the older version - this one, I think, and her father told me once it did crash from time to time. My + box gets quite a pounding on a daily basis - loads of time lapse stuff, programs being recorded from half way thru when I've been watching it from the start (makes the box record the program from the start, so lots of catching up to do). Seems like I've got a good one! Does the amount you can live pause before it crashes depend on how much you have stored on it? citysig - I agree NTL is good value. I've just had enough bad experiences with them (I do on-site IT work, callouts) that I've been put off them. I'd be more inclined to recommend them if they didn't limit you to using them as your broadband ISP. I know why they do it, I understand the technial issues behind it, I just don't like it.
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Post by antharro on Nov 20, 2005 23:52:49 GMT
Interesting. I've never really messed with the scheduler much. I find the Series Link feature very useful, tho, tho a 7 day limitation is a bit naff. I'll have a play at some point. As for NTHell *cough* NTL, that's exactly one reason I went the Sky+ TV / BT Phone / ADSL route instead of NTL for everything. My aunt's NTL box used to crash on a regular basis if you even as much as looked at it. The new silver shiny thing she has now is much better, than the old Pace box. Having said that, I know of one sure way of making my Sky+ box crash, but aside from that, it's 99% stable. And woo! for Emmerdale... not...
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