flyinghaggis

Dear Santa, A new Alienware Area 51 (X99/Haswell-E) Computer ....and one of Dell's curved 34" 21:9 monitors to go with it please PS I've been a very good boy this year....mostly....

Since my local exchange/cabinet was upgraded to fibre broadband earlier this year (my connection went from 1.5Mbps > 36Mbps) I personally don't really have any need for 4k blu-ray but I can appreciate that physical media is the only way millions of people will have to experience 4k movies for a good few years yet. There's still a place for physical media IMO

I'd say around 5 years life span. They haven't been out a year yet so I think you'll get your money's worth from either console to be honest. If you're holding off buying to wait for the next gen you'll be waiting a while! Having said that I'm quite disappointed by the latest gen consoles in terms of their hardware specs. I recall when the Xbox360/PS3 came out they were pretty much on a par with a top of the range PCs at the time. The PS4/XB1 are only really comparable to a mid range one now. If you've bought a PC in the last 3 years I reckon you could fit a £150-200 video card to it and it would offer better visuals than either console. Sony/MS have obviously decided this time round they're not prepared to lose money selling the consoles (with the intention of making it back on the games) like they did with the last gen.

Very special computers

I've had a look around but it does look like NCH Express Scribe is definitely the major player when it comes to windows transcription software. There don't seem to be that many competitors actually but I guess maybe it's a dying market segment as most people can type at decent speed these days and don't really require a secretary/PA to do it for them.

We're looking for a solution for PA's and typists at our school to use for typing up dictated notes they've been given. We've previously used a piece of software called NCH Express Scribe (Transcription Software. Foot Pedal Software Player) in conjunction with a foot pedal for pause/rewind functionality. This seemed to work OK but I'd wondered if there were any better solutions out there. Ideally I'd hope the person dictating the notes could use a tablet/mobile phone app to create the MP3 audio file which they could then email or share when the typist in order to save them from having to use a dedicated Dictaphone and faff around with memory cards/tapes. What's everyone else using?

I'll probably give it a try again when the Draenor expansion is out but I've got a feeling I'll struggle to get into it. They may give you a free character lvl boost up to 90 but I'll have no idea what to do! What's the easiest class for a lvl 90 noob to play as?

Destiny is out in a months time. I've tried the beta and it's definitely going to be worth picking up if you have a ps4/XB1. Destiny (video game) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In terms of games out now Last of Us remastered is pretty good if you haven't played it on PS3

Thanks for the heads up. I'd read "pause live TV" and assumed it would have DVR functionality. That's pretty disappointing and makes the device far less useful than it could have been

Just noticed that MS are releasing a TV tuner adapter for the UK. Could be pretty handy for watching tv whilst gaming or recording programmes. Cheap too at only £25 Xbox One Digital TV Tuner Coming to Europe - GameSpot On a similar theme has anyone on here bought the xbox one headset? Official Xbox One Stereo Headset (Xbox One): Amazon.co.uk: PC & Video Games I'm trying to decide whether to buy the headset or just get the adapter on it's own to use with my PS4 headset? Erring towards the adapter at the moment.

I thought I recognised the name! I downloaded it and it's pretty terrible to be honest! Not a patch on the X-wing VS TIE Fighter series. Also, I'd forgotten how 90's "full motion video" was on pretty much on a par with your average animated GIF today

You can download and play Wing Commander 3 'On the house' - PC - News - HEXUS.net Free to download on Origin just now. I remember it being a a bit ropey (and running really badly on my 66Mhz 486-DX2 at the time) to be honest but might give it a blast for a quick nostalgia trip. Also features performances from some fairly big name actors. Mark Hamill, Maclom MacDowell and John Rhys-Davies Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Looking forward to Star Citizen once it's released though.....

Definitely worth pre-ordering if you haven't already IMO. It's the first game I've played for a while that feels genuinely fresh, new and 'next-gen' in terms of what it offers though obviously it's out on the PS3/360 as well. As long as Bungie manage to keep adding variety in the other planets/levels and don't go too over the top charging EA style for DLC content then I think it's going to be fantastic. Good quick review here that pretty much echoes my thoughts.

Played some of the deathmatch tonight. I like how you can jump back and forth between co-op and competitive inbetween swapping and upgrading your weapons. It's pretty satisfying and the balance seems fairly well done too. I still wish this was coming out on PC though as I much prefer playing FPS games with a mouse. There are rumours but nothing confirmed yet and I don't think I could stand waiting >6 months after the console release to get my mitts on the full game. My only minor niggle are that whilst the graphics are nice I wouldn't say they're anything we haven't seen before, and I don't want to sound like a broken record on this one, but it's noticeable that it isn't running at native 1080p! They are supposed to be aiming for it with the final release though so there's still time left for it to be fixed....

Beta codes all gone I'm afraid!

Got this for pre-ordering the game and I'm quite enjoying it so far. Feels a bit like borderlands mixed with Halo plus a few MORPG elements thrown in for good measure. I also have a couple of spare codes for the PS4 version if anyone wants to try it out. Anyone else playing it?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not under the illusion that our government/country is any better/worse than another but I think the US being given automatic access to other countries citizens and companies date purely by virtue of it being held by a US company is a step too far. By all means countries' governments should share data to prevent the illegal activities taking place across borders but the US is basically arguing to get access to this without the need to discuss it with anyone else first. From what I've read the EU safe harbour law was created specifically to prevent this exact scenario and the US is looking for ways to bypass it. I don't think you could ever argue that kind of activity is actually a good thing for us here in the UK!

I've always suspected that the EU safe harbour rules wouldn't be worth the paper they're written on when dealing with US companies. Even if the US government backs down or loses the case would you ever really have faith that Google/MS/Apple wouldn't be forced behind the scenes to hand over their data regardless of where it's stored if the US government asked them to? Ultimately, surely where the servers are located is of less importance than who manages or has access to them! It'll be interesting to see how it plays out though...

BBC News - Cuddly puppets axed as Wonga attempts big clean-up Cuddly puppets axed as Wonga attempts big clean-up After its regular appearances as the whipping boy for all that is bad in payday lending, Wonga is attempting to offer a new more serious and honest face to customers - and its critics.

Looks like a great spec to me and is pretty much what I'd go for if I were buying a new rig (Devil's canyon i7,nvidia 770 and an Asus mobo). I guess if you wanted to cost cut you could probably get an i5 and not suffer much of a performance drop. However if you're spending that kind of money and looking to overclock it then why not get the best CPU possible for the sake of an extra £50. Would be interested to see some benchmarks of how the overclocking goes when you get your hands on it.

That's a pretty decent price for a 500Gb SSD drive and less than I paid for my current 80Gb Intel SSD 5 years ago!

Looks to be around double the price of DDR3. I don't expect DDR4 will make enough of a difference to performance to justify that kind of price hike but it may be worth it in another year or so when the price gap narrows. AFAIK Intel doesn't have plans to release any new high end desktop processors this year (other than the latest 4790k devils canyon upgrade) so we'll probably have to wait until the release of broadwell in 2015 before we start seeing desktop chipsets that can use DDR4 to any meaningful effect. I keep waiting for Intel to unveil the next big performance jump but every year they disappoint me with an incremental 10-15% increase over the previous gen. I'm still using a 5 year old i7-920 as my main PC and struggling to find a reason to upgrade it!

If I were you I'd spring the extra for 2 x 8Gb RAM to give you 16Gb. 8Gb is kind of the minimum these days. Also means that you can upgrade to 32Gb in a couple of years time when prices fall without having to throw out your existing memory.

Ideal present for any world cup fans! Luis Suarez Bite Bottle Opener

I've just gone from 1.3Mbps broadband to 35Mbps fibre. Lets just say the difference is certainly noticeable!