SYNACK

How about one of these http://www.my-io.com/products/ wires in behind the stereo with its own amp so bypasses it when nessisary.

Its not like its welded in, replacing is always an option.

Happy new year for 5h ago, was stuck in a dead spot with no cell or WiFi coverage.

The iPad one is a good choice, it is actually the most robust and compact one with the thickest screen glass, the one thing it lacks is cameras.

It's not overly wrong, some of it is practically malware. The sound stuff is usually one of the support apps and/or built into a custom driver package. It can use monitoring hooks that look like malware hence the confusion by some software. Depending on the application it may have 'immunised'/broken these links.

Poor MediaPC, I agree that they were great and that their time has passed. The advent of smartTVs with DLNA and little android media sticks / RasberryPis has moved the requirement from by the tv to a back cupboard somewhere. I have been using a media server with DLNA and a decent home network for a while now. Its just decentralising it meaning you get your media on any TV rather than just the one. Personally I just moved the media centre to the back room and using WMP's DLNA sharing but W7's DLNA does not cope with mkv. I had a low power Atom board so banging a few drives in was basically the equivalent of a NAS anyway. This is one place where Samsung TVs way better, or LG ones as Sony only really supports one video format now, Sony DRM evil++.

Yea, um D-Link is well, D-Link. I have heard that their NAS units are much better than their switches and other gear but that is a pretty low bar to jump. Saying that I have heard of one that has been used in a small business and seems to be still serving out stuff to five users happily after a couple of years. Remember to record the IP address you set on it incase as their config software is/was very unstable and a tad weird UI wise.

Greif, it seems that with all these things they are only any good if you can crack open their sculls and give them a lobotomy. I have seen that you can dump Ubuntu on them so that may be my best bet, I'll give it a week or so then it may be getting a re-flash/install. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Nexus7/Installation

Thanks, Not sure what ate the battery, put juice defender on which may help, if only the os cold deal with power sensibly itself. Stats seem to have reset too so who knows what it was up to. Just checked, even that power saver is $2, not much but it all adds up and it would mean letting Google near my credit card. The button to kill the keyboard click sound also does not work which is rubbish and frustrating. Ended up with the cloud version of RDP eventually but the free one is limited to one PC and is still a bit rubbish, no touchpad mode for instance and no decent full screen mode thanks to that. Additionally I am not massively happy paying ten times as much for RDP on the supposedly cheaper and more mature platform for an inferior product comparatively to ConnectMe on WP7. I struggle to see how this is the leading mobile OS, 4.2 is majorly squiffy on Google's own hardware without vendor tampering, how bad is it going to be elsewhere. Edit: the 4.2 system app "People" also does not seem to sync any people data from anything other than Google, Facebook and Live don't show up at all. The Calendar app does not grab Facebook calendars either, only Google or Exchange. Sadly even WP7 is far more open, it grabs contacts and calendars from everywhere.

Haswell really is mythic at this point, Intel had better be able to deliver or there are going to be a lot of irate people, me being one. Still it would give and a window to save themselves, their low power line is not that bad and has potential.

Having just got a Nexus 7 I have to vote for surface, you can get RDP for it (nexus) but it's rubbish or expensive. You've got to turn off most of the security to make it work. From my usage RT/8 is faster and more stable. You may ask why I got a 7 rather than a surface, $900 price difference. They are just stupidly expensive here, the x86 ones are cheaper but still double the cost of a 7, around £180 here on the best special they have had. I'm still looking at apps so it may get better but I have to vote for W8 for actual us ability for anything else than angry birds and consuming Google comparable web pages.

Thanks for the info, figures about miracast, I use dlna for most things. aVia is good for grabbing and pushing dlna. Won't do screen cast though. I don't think the dock will be quicker as it looks to just pass through the standard USB voltage. After leaving it overnight it has burnt 50% of the battery, I just wish the W8 stuff was avalible at a reasonable cost. I have a W7 phone and the ui and apps are just better. Androids api is still superior, stuff like accessing WiFi details actually work but us ability wise it is still around Windows 95. It has the useless bar at the bottom eating at least 20px thanks to Apple making buttons illegal and the status bar eating 15px at the top. I'm glad the resolution is as high as it is so I can still see things because of it. I still can't find a good RDP client that supports NLA and custom resolution. At least all the angry birds stuff if free :-)

Just picked up a Nexus 7 today, hardware is nice and fast but 4.2 is a shocking crashfest, its like going back to Windows 98. It came with 4.1 which seemed a little better but I can only really see me using it as a couch web browser/game machine. Screen is really nice but the charging is a joke, you basically need to have it off for it to actually charge otherwise it will - while plugged in - stay at the level it was or drain slowly. Got Flash going on it by following the guides and chucking Firefox at it, spent half of today stalking around the app store which is frankly depressing. There are tones of apps but half of them don't work and those that are left are insanely limited or expensive. I'm sure there are some good ones hidden in the haystack. I think I prefer the older versions of Android TBH. Edit Tapatalk HD is nice though. I don't have any miracast devices so can't test that.

The industrial one Amazon.com: Canless Air System O2 Hurricane Industrial Unit: Camera & Photo seems a bit better review wise.

ThinkGeek :: Hurricane 2 Canless Air System Industrial Canless Air System - Canned Air and Air Duster Alternative | 200+ MPH Looks cool and better than those pre-packaged compressed air cans. Now I just need to get one of my schools to agree to buy one.

It may not be graphics drivers but the graphics car itself, have had something similar with a dirty NVidia quadro FX 1500m card. Fine under Dinosaur edition (XP) bit glitch under Vista and 7 till aero was turned off (GPU acceleration). Windows 8 has no option to turn off the 3D acceleration short of using the default VGA driver which does not support 1980x1200. If it is this it may be fixable by re-thermal compounding the GPU heat pipe and/or reflowing the solder. In my case though it is simple rubbish engineering on the part of Nvidia and nothing short of replacement will fix it.

Agreed re the built in satnav but I wouldn't be down on it for being non-touch. In a car you need decent haptic feedback so you don't crash your car every time you need to press a button - sure it's not that bad but way worse than a real button or several along with the touch so that its a bit safer.

As we are first down here in the southern hemisphere I'll start. Merry Christmas everyone. Presents wrapped and ready, fence posts re-concreted in (it was an odd day), temperature finally dropped to 22 from a high of 29, now I can finally get a few hours of sleep before the real madness starts - and to all, a good night (when it comes around to that bit of the planet).

surely you can just reconfigure it to repack the existing video stream and keep the stuff that works. That's what I did on a bunch of stroppy xvid files, just re-encoded the dodgy sound and kept the video stream. Did not repack them to a different container but am sure it is possible. Besides winff is just the front end to batch job them easily, there is nothing stopping you from swapping out the ffmpeg exe and libs for the latest version.

This can usually bang through them quite quickly and it is free: WinFF - Free Video Converter

Weird, the hp stuff is more expencive here but worth it for the quality. One school I was working with tried to buy Dell gear, after a week of trying to get even a account manager to talk about quotes with we gave up. The other school already had some contact with Dell but have switched to HP for quality and reliability reasons.

HP, had nothing but trouble with shoddy dell gear, had dodgy hp stuff but dell has had more issues for me.

Which one, anyway why are you complaining, aren't you always on about how everything ever should be a web page?

That looks good, clean and effective.

Yeap, I use media center as it does just its job. The one issue I have with it is its lack of good support for MKV, other than that it handles terabytes of media over stacks of drives easily.