Mike_B

When comparing with Subarus and Evos, remember that they are 4WD while we only have 2WD. So if there is the slightest bit of damp on the ground, they will have a lot more grip and will disappear out front while we have our power chopped off by the traction control.

You lucky gits with garages - will be looking to move house next year hopefully (credit crunch could help me out here, if prices keep falling!) and a garage with a door into the house is a priority for me. Looking forward to coming home in the pouring rain and not getting wet!! :D

Is that right? How do Apple's own Time Capsule drives work then - or is that because they are Apple kit that they can work over a network? Their website talks about backing up seamlessly over wireless, so it must be using some sort of network arrangement!

I think it would be fair to say that most things that occur in pairs on a car should be replaced in pairs - ie brake components, suspension components etc. Replacing just one side is a bad idea as it's out of balance then. Possible exception would be tyres as long as the opposite side is still fairly new and you're replacing because of something like a puncture rather than it wearing out. As TheDon says, 'pairs' refers to left and right at the same time, not front and rear on the same side!

My missus moved in with me in June. Her insurance company was told but when it came to renewal time last month they sent the reminder and the renewal quote to the old address! When she rang up to find out what was going on they couldn't explain it - they had down the new address as being current but still sent the papers to the old place. Idiots... Luckily it had only run out two days before she realised and she hadn't used the car in that time anyway. That's a great price you got Dave - especially seeing as it's a 430!

Just a thought - cleaning the throttle body may well sort it out. If not, check the pipes that feed vacuum to the brake servo. Under closed throttle and with heavy braking, there will be a very high vacuum in the manifold and any air leaks into there might potentially cause a weakened mixture and stall the engine?

I returned to my GS430 at Heathrow after a week working in Scotland to find the car completely stone dead. I couldn't understand it either, but the chap in the car park rescue truck gave me a jump start and it turned out I'd left an inside reading light on. You can't really see them from outside, especially when you park up at dawn and you need the light to gather all your stuff for the week, but when you step outside it's bright enough you can't see it on inside the car - easy to forget it especially if you can see the bus for your terminal coming round the corner!! It did kill the battery though - it never held a charge properly again so I got a genuine Toyota replacement (roughly £70) and it's been perfectly alright ever since. 3 year warranty on mine as well, so peace of mind for a while.

Waste of space in my opinion. It's too immediate, it goes up and down like a yo-yo everytime you press or lift off the gas pedal.

SE K850i. 8/10. Big enough to use, small enough to go into a pocket. Proper, positive key action and no joystick which always used to go wrong on earlier Kxxx phones. I have an SE bluetooth carkit which works nicely with it. I like it, though I know some people have had issues with the 3 touch-keys, but I'd happily buy another tomorrow if I needed to replace it.

I've got a better idea - why not just ban Tyger? A few months ago I did a search on his posts - there were a couple in the LS forum that were car related, almost everything else was extremely, (borderline offensively), pro-Apple and anti-everything-else propaganda postings. I'd put money on that state of affairs being the same today if I had ten minutes to trawl through the posts. Tyger - you're not useful, you're rude, and frankly you don't contribute anything useful on here, and I for one would rather you weren't here at all. This would be a better and more useful forum without you - there are plenty of people who can helpfully point out suitable Apple products in response to genuine questions, without making people feel stupid at the same time. I doubt very much I'm alone in feeling like that.

Was it a new turbo you put on? I had a turbodiesel once that smoked terribly when idling; it was the turbo bearings letting oil past which was then pooling in the turbo housing. Once you put a few revs on it all got sucked into the combustion chambers and then came out the back as smoke.

Slip the copper a few quid to find out who did it, and chop the little f*****s hands off. Police will be glad to not have to deal with them nicking anything again, too.

There is a full list of licences in this article: Full List and a brief list of common, well known ones, contained in this article (click on the picture to see it more easily): Brief table The situation with LloydsTSB and HBOS is as yet unknown, the merger hasn't gone through yet anyway.

I suppose it's just a starting point for negotiations - if you don't like their prices (and who does?) then bargain them down and see what they will do. Being propped up by the manufacturer won't last forever and they will have to discount. It's a problem for the whole market, I don't suppose Ford are selling many cars either, at the moment.

£50k per bank per customer, if joint account £50k each. So therefore £100k per bank in as many banks as you need - obviously there is an upper limit restricted by the number of banks available but I don't know anyone who has that much cash! :P Technically it's not per 'bank' but per banking license. For example, RBS and NatWest are covered under the same license, so keeping £50k in both means you're only protected in one of them. Similarly Banco Santander own both Abbey and Alliance & Leicester, so the same applies. You need to find out which banks own each other and spread your money between groups rather than 'banks'. There are lists of insitutions that come under the same licence around, can't remember where they are off-hand though. You'd be surprised how many people have cash lying around - sometimes it's just a matter of timing. On another forum I frequent, a guy sold a house and stuck the £200k equity into Icesave while he was finalising buying another one. As of now, that money simply doesn't exist any more - he might get it back at some point, but not straightaway.

Lots of things don't work quite as nicely with Vista as the driver model and network stacks were completely re-written. But then XP came out 7 years ago, so not surprising really that things have changed. If the Netgear forums suggestions don't work, my tip would be to have a look on a big PC manufacturer's website to find out what wireless cards come fitted with laptops which come with Vista to start with. Then look for a replacement wireless card based on one of those chipsets, since it will then definitely be supported by Vista. Mark W's suggestion on the power saving sounds very plausible as well, especially if it always works for about the same amount of time. If that is the case, then running the adapter through a USB hub (which sucks some power and so the PC would keep it active) would probably solve the issue for you.

I like mine - it's simple to use and I don't mind iTunes. What's odd is what will replace it - something has to be at the top of the sales charts and I'm not sure what would replace it. 'iPod' has entered the language in much the same way as 'hoover' or 'sellotape'. People call their mp3 players iPods even if they actually aren't.

You're right about it being an individual type of thing, but IMO wrong about the offset mortgage. If the worst should happen, it won't be a knock for knock at all, you would lose the money you were using to offset, and still owe the mortgage. Worst of all worlds. IMO the best thing to do is to use the savings to pay off a big chunk of the mortage outright - then you'll have less to lose, and much less debt to pay too.

We're about to find out how good the FSCS 50k guarantee is: Linky

99 would put it as having the earlier brake master cylinder as it is a pretty early car. Does anyone know what year they changed? Mine is a 2001 model, but has the later light cluster on the back so I don't know where that would put it in terms of brakes. I get paranoid every time I think about it, knowing the cost of those cylinders...

The £50k thing is all very well, but if more than one of the big banks go under, there is no way there will be anywhere near enough money to pay everyone up to their £50k limit. The government has spent every last penny it had from the good times, and will only be able to afford it by either borrowing tens of billions at the current high rates in the global money market (and require swinging tax rises to pay for it), or otherwise by just printing money which will cause a huge spike in inflation (and thus depressing the value of everyone elses money at the same time). Good old Gordy - 'an end to boom and bust' he said, back in '97... arrogant berk!

Well I won't be sneering at you for having those views - I think you're spot on. Two things drive house prices - demand, and available credit. Strong demand and too cheap/badly regulated credit forced them far higher than they should ever have been. Demand is dropping for two reasons; firstly large numbers of temporary migrants going home (eg Polish workers) because of better wages back home, and secondly because a lot of the demand was people buying second/third properties as an investment rather than somewhere to live. Available credit is dropping through the floor because mortgages are much less widely available; with property prices so high, decent deposits are much harder to save up for, and with the reduction in 90%+ LTV mortgages there will be a crash of the first time buyers who fuel the whole market from the bottom up. Suddenly they need to save £20k instead of £5k, and that takes time to do. Unfortunately what has happened over the last ten years, and the last five or six especially, is that people have been using cheap credit to live way beyond their means, and now that the interest rates have increased on all those discount mortgages have shot up, are suddenly feeling the pinch big time which will have a knock-on effect on the wider economy. Once that starts to drop, job losses will rise, and the situation becomes self-perpetuating with more unpaid mortgages and credit card bills etc etc. It's only partly true to blame things on the US sub-prime situation, the simple fact is that people took on far, far, too much debt that they couldn't really afford, ignoring the warnings on their mortgage applications that say things like 'consider whether you will be able to pay this back if your circumstances change or interest rates rise' - instead, they took affordability to mean the cost of 'servicing debt' rather than 'repaying debt', thus leaving themselves open to real problems when the interest rates rose. Things will get better, but not any time soon. The longer the boom the bigger the bust, and this boom has been going since 1992 when we came out the last recession.

It probably will bring up loads of complaints, but that doesn't make them right. There are 3 people sat within 5 yards of me right now with 3G iPhones. All are on O2 (obviously), as am I with my SE K850i. I have a solid 5-bar signal strength on both 3G and 2G EDGE, none of them have more than 2 bars. I am well aware that the number of bars shown on screen is simply a software function, but something must be stopping them from seeing that signal as a full strength. The office has glass walls (as opposed to windows) and the nearest O2 mast according to the Ofcom sitefinder site is on top of the building opposite (on St. Thomas hospital in London, for reference). There is something causing those iPhones to receive poor signals, and it's not JUST the network. I think that when they are more widely available, we'll see just as many complaints from users on other networks too.

Only on the iPhone packages. I have an £30/month O2 contract (BTW, it's excellent on both 3G and EDGE in the areas I need it to be - sharply better than the Orange coverage on my girlfriend's phone) and it certainly doesn't come with any hotspot deals. So I think it's the iPhone tariff that has that, because they are focussed on the data side in addition to telephone calls/text messages. EDIT: O2 better than Orange *where we need it*. Some nets are better in some places than others, always has been and always will be.

That's an interesting point. Would that make any noticably difference to anything? The ECU takes a while to learn about the fuel so if you're alternating tanks would the car ever actually know what it had in the tank? I'd have thought this was a complete waste of time but I'd be interested to hear what other have to say on this. Once you concede that the car doesn't really know what it has in the tank, surely you also have to concede that it makes virtually no difference anyway? There are a number of independent studies which suggest they are a waste of money, and I'd be very interested to see any non-oil company sponsored tests which empirically show an increase in mpg or performance. Unless the engine's timing is designed specifically to make use of the chemistry of high-octane fuels, of course, such as the RS200.