Sirbendy

Try: Vauxhall Owners Network Lots of very Vx savvy bods in there, some extremely knowledgeable diesel bods as well.

Not familiar with scooters, but no power over 50% throttle, not valves...if you have decent compression (if it runs, you probably do), then I'd be looking at the carburettor, throttle linkage and cable, or possibly a restricted exhaust..Maybe an overtight belt? Not sure if that'd cause power loss through friction. One of these days I might resurrect Jems old scooter..was given to her by her grandad, not been used since '83..it's a Puch Maxi.

Indeedy. All tied into the matrix system so we can link up any room projector/sound system to a particular feed, on request. Rooms can have Sky, freeview, VHS Video (yes, we kept one), 6 DVD players for DVD requests, digital signage feed, or a direct feed from the school theatre for broadcasts. I often get asked to send Tennis etc to rooms in the appropriate season.

Yep, I've used them. Resellers for Southern Electric IIRC. I used them when we were renting a property with a prepay meter, as they don't discriminate against them. Not bad for low usage households at all (I had both power and gas with them), but for more usage, you can get better deals from the package/bigger setups. No complaints. I'm currently with Eon - got my first quarterly bill for the house we've bought - £190 gas/electric, or which about £45 was gas. NOT bad at all. Compared to the last place we were in (rented), where the bills were normally about £500/quarter (old house, open plan, solid walls, single glazing etc), I think I died and went to a better place. Still..about £18/week usage is a bit high for my liking, so I'm hunting through the house with my power meter...SOMETHING is hungry. I got my powermeter for the whole house down to 40 watts at 10pm last night, entire ground floor and lighting circuits off..so it's something on the upper floor...heh. I do enjoy a game of "hunt the power hog".

My Desk is large enough for (and actually houses) 4 workstations (Mine, test, spare and CCTV/DVD matrix controller/router) and 17" TFTs, antistatic matted, 2 shelving units, cable managed, 16 240v sockets and 10 LAN points (PoE and non-PoE). I then have a repair bay with an identical desk in. Ruddy expensive desks by all accounts, but they were specced and fitted for us as part of this build, heh. Tamba door storage units for hiding clutter are good. NM has a standard desk, with a PC, laptop stand etc, "in floor" sockets, and a 56" plasma on his wall, with the CCTV joystick console on the desk. Plasma connects to CCTV matrix, digital signage system, broadcast system, laptop, Sky and Freeview. Always makes people go "ooh..."..heh.

Ooh, recipe? We're very into this malkarkey with the littly - we like to know exactly what she's eating, and see if we can make "healthy" nicer to look at as well. I want to look at healthier homemade crisps too. Good god, what happened to the tech who lived on junk and was pleased about it?!? Parenthood, how strange...hah!

Oh YES.

I can't say as I watch TV..I don't. I refuse to pay the license fee. There are some good things, but there's a lot of tat/repeated tat/reheated and useless tat as well. I listen to BBC Radio Shropshire - I like it. Radio 4 as well..classical is fun. In the car it's Kerrang all the way. Too many channels now in my view for the content that's actually worth watching, the rest is just filled with bunk.

Is anyone running Win7 with IE9? If so, has anyone had issues with it flaking out and bombing, when using e-portal/google search/other sites? It seems to come and go, and some of our users are getting quite annoyed with it. Mine was doing it for a week or so, especially if I had scripts enabled on a google search. I'm finding our web helpdesk can cause it to flake 6-7 times a day at the second. OK, it'll try to recover the tab, but sometimes it tries, fails, tries, fails and gets itself stuck until it gives up. Tiny bit at a dead end here....

Myself and the NM. Current count of 500ish PCs, plus laptop fleet. Plus digital signage, servers, security systems, CCTV operation when needed, IP phone system, BMS control, and so on, and so forth. I think it's pretty fair to say we have some level of involvement in every system in this place. Kids, over 1000 as I recall...staff are in 3 figures. All systems spread across 3 buildings on 1 site. It's..busy..!

Congrats here also.. My daughter is coming up for 2 in 2 months, and #2 is..shall we say, erm...in the planning stages..heh.

We've just rolled out a test suite of Win7 over the top of our WinVistargh setup - a few glitches in evidence, but once again the darn Adobe CS4 suite "register" nag is bugging each and every new user that logs in...now, on the reference PC, pre image, we registered it, and it went away. How on earth can we kill the thing off for users post-build? Anyone got any ideas?

I buy cheap budgets (£30ish) for the Astra. It's a MK4 with the 15 inch rims, steelies. Never had a budget fail, and the grip..? Well, I can have all 4 screaming, and there's nothing but predictable behaviour. Hell, mine hold the car beautifully on roundabouts, and cambered ones at that. Much to the upset of my junior tech in his SXi with the wide rims/wide rubber, I have far better "chuckability". Never been a concern to me. I've never gone expensive, and I don't baby my cars...they get mercilessly thrashed when it's me on my own. When new, I find tyres too slippy...they have to be given a thorough workout and a good scrubbing before they bite to my satisfaction.

Mmm, we had them last night too...mildly annoying, they were disturbing my contemplation of life while watching my eco-lawnmowers working (rabbit and guinea pig). I thought little of it until I realised one patch of short grass was heaving with them. Took a wander in the house, brought out Roomba, set up a perimeter round the affected patch and left Roomba to it. Good fun with a technical bent to it.

Speaking from experience, sometimes it's the automatic response. Myself and NM were working on the old building, doing..oh, I forget what. Class full of quiet kids, then "BZZT!", we both got a hefty shock. It was a case of "BLOODY HELL!..erm..I mean "Ouch".." I had a PSU go off gunshot style right by my ear one day..managed to catch that and turn it into a "FU...OOOOOOK! That..hurt. Ow." When my junior tech got propelled across the gym by a live-earth short on a metal pedestal he was working on, he let rip a few choice words..some were aimed at me, as i picked up my radio and said "Body bag to the gym please, we've just killed him. Yes, you heard me. BANG, and he's flat on his back. Oh no, wait..I can see signs of life. Either that or he's having a fit..". Ruddy electrocution virgins.. It was his last day to boot! Poor lad.

I've got 2 of the A110s. Both mine have been upgraded to 1.5gb RAM, but both also have the 8gb SSD. So far they're run Linpus, Ubuntu, DSL, Puppy Linux, XP, Vista, Win7...now one is running Jolicloud, and the other is running Meego. No problems on any of them, short of the (quite normal) godawful wifi card flaking out at random, and now my main one has a cracked screen (£30). I even use the main one with Virtualbox under Puppy Linux, hosting an XP VM. Works perfectly. Why? Because OPCOM has no linux ports..heh. I need that for the car.

What about turtles, or whatever the heck they're known as these days..they were "Roamers" in the last Primary/Infants I was at. Those are good. One of the main reasons I bought myself..I mean Isabel..a Big Trak..

My 19 month old has free reign with our Flip (and she can work it just fine). She has supervised access to the S5600 (Missus' Digicam), and can sort of work that. When I fetch her from nursery in the night time she has my phone and some headphones to listen to the music on there...last night she was headbanging and arm waving all the way home, so much so I had to pull over and have a not so quiet chuckle. I give her supervised access to my AA1 netbook too. As long as they know how to treat things, I wouldn't worry. The only casualties have been a remote control that went for a swim in the bath, and my router which got wee'd on, on Sunday. That'll teach me to put it out of the way during nappy off time..heh.

I own an eBay special clone of the OPCOM for GM/Holden/SAAB vehicles. £25, plugs in to the car and my netbook, runs like a dream. Saved me lots of hassle. Stuff the genuine ££££ version, the knock off is perfectly good for everything upto and including enabling features, troubleshooting and reflashing/resetting ECUs.

First thing I did when we moved into this house was look at the incoming line...2 sockets on the wall, 1 a mess, one pristine. Opened up the pristine one to find it contained screws, an earth wire, some rawplugs..and nothing else. Bashed up socket was ancient and just hanging in there. This led back to an old "block" style internal/external breakout box. Wires in that were corroding, dull and manky. Rubber gloves on, wire cutters out. 20 minutes later, the shiny new socket is solo, incoming line to breakout box is remade and shiny, outgoing wiring to shiny new socket. Phone line 100% better, Broadband sat at a solid 7mb. BT/Plus reckoned 4-5. Still want to get a new style NTE5 with test socket. Next month maybe. And I know I shouldn't touch the BT incoming wiring, but frankly they won't know..it was a mess, it needed doing. Heh.

I was woken at 6.10am by Isabel who'd toddled into the spare room (I have a cough so am in there), with "DADDY! Cuddle...AAAAAHHHHH!"..and a great big hug. Then I spent some time reading her stories until a sane time. Then we spent time in the garden with Flymo and pigpig (Rabbit and guinea pig) "cutting" the lawn, and Izzy helping her mum with the garden while I rehung the guttering (physics say water doesn't run uphill - nobody told the old owners..). My mum came down at 10 to cut lawn #2 (knee high) with the heavy iron petrol mower, Izzy fell asleep on the lawn and was transferred to sofa. Once awake we went to Homebase and bought more house bits and lots of paint swatches, and went to see Grandmas #2 and #3, then home, more garden play, tea, bathtime, Isabel to bed and a soak in the spa bath. Most relaxing..heh.

On my little solar home system I use car batteries. Yes, I know they're not ideal, but they're a tenner apeice from the scrapyard..and cigarette lighter sockets? Ooh, lots, and lots... Inverters, I have 2..one 80w jobbie (£5, homebase) and one 180w jobbie (ex-PC UPS). Cheap parts to replace..

We got some little dome shaped things containing a liquid...ants had some, went away, never came back. The rice thing, yep..heard that. I quite enjoy using the flame tip on my soldering iron, as it goes..

Mother in law has an 11 plater (or might be a 10)..Pug 30..8 is it? New thing, hatch? Nice, but french build quality. Autobox (e-CVT with semi-auto mode) has thrown a rod now 3 times in 2 months, dealership sit round with their thumbs up their bottoms, saying "ummerr..." and being generally unhelpful. Contrast that to all my autos - UK made, not one under 11 years old, daily short trips, not treated with kid gloves...utterly reliable. Missus now understands why I say "French car? Rather push the Astra, dearest..".

106/Saxo I would avoid unless they've really improved the seat tendency of the back collapsing in an impact, resulting in probable whiplash. I started out in a 1.4, then a 2.0, (Both french), then went to 2 Rover 1.6's, followed by a Vauxhall 1.6SPi, followed by my current 2 - a Vauxhall 1.4MPi Project, and a Vauxhall 1.6MPi as a daily hack. Back when I started, finding a little engined automatic wasn't easy..