Mike_B

I've just insured for next year with Elephant, having been with Admiral last year... £389 for fully comp, 18k miles, business use and £250 excess (total). Pretty good I thought, for a 4.3 litre V8!! Getting older - it's not all bad... ;)

Any movement from Panasonic yet? Have you tried a stiff letter to the CS dept, citing the 5 year warranty on new sets and the fact yours is less than half that and is becoming unusable? Might be worth writing to one of the hifi or AV magazines as well, to let them know the situation?

Well, there are some people reporting it, true... But if you replace Panasonic with Sony or LG you get the same things being reported on those TVs instead. I guess it's more of a 'feature' that flat screens tend to fail with lines on them, rather than total failure or loss of one colour gun like you might get with a CRT set. How old is your set?

I've just done a quick google of panasonic plasma and lines on screen, but haven't found 'pages of people with the same problem'. Have you got a link to the forums etc with this? Not good if there really are loads of them with the problem... The PX600 models are now 2 generations old, and the OP is likely to be interested in a full HD model which will have a completely different panel in it so is unlikely to experience the same issue. BTW, Panasonic are also offering 5 year warranties if you buy from a proper dealer, and if you buy from John Lewis you get a free 5 year warranty on any brand they sell.

You may well have been, but not by someone who knew what they were talking about!! Certainly there are some components that crop up in different makes - there are only a handful of plasma screen makers for example, so all the different brands will only use one of those 5 manufacturers. The electronics makes a huge difference, as does the care and attention paid to the quality of all the other components that drive the display.

You haven't said what sort of mail system you are using.... most mail servers can do this for you, or alternatively if you have some sort of mail filtering system like MailSweeper you can have it done here. Otherwise, you will need to do it manually as part of the signature on each client. Can you not cut and paste it into an email and get your users to add it to the bottom of their signatures?

Can second kam05's recommendation for Panasonic. Just took delivery (week or two ago) of a 42inch full HD plasma - and it's absolutely stunning. The Panasonics don't look as bright in the shops, but when you get them home and set them up properly, the image looks a lot more natural than the ultra-bright Sonys and Samsungs which stand out so much in the shops. The sheer power of the luminance coming off the Sonys makes my eyes water!! (It seems to be them in particular, maybe they are just set up in the shops like that in the same way that some radio stations pump up the loudness of their music to make the reception *seem* better...) The Panasonic is much more comfortable to watch for longer periods, especially for movies. A couple of months before I bought, I spent an hour in a quality hifi and home cinema shop in New Malden (SW London). The guys in there really know their stuff; their opinion was that the Pioneers were the best, but the Panasonics were 95% of the quality, for 75% of the price - which makes them much better value unless money isn't an object. Of all the ones on the market, and they had several makes on display, their opinion was that Pioneer and Panasonic were the best, in that order. The considered opinion is that for 37" and below, LCD is the way to go, but for 40" and above, plasma is better. Plasma also tends to give more natural looking colours, especially in darker scenes as black is exactly that on a plasma - black rather than dark grey. This is because of the way each produces the image; on an LCD screen there is a very powerful backlight which is then filtered through each pixel by combinations of LCDs. On a plasma, each pixel is stimulated to produce light internally, so when a pixel is dark there really is no light coming from it - and no possibility of light leaking through. So since you're looking at a big set, look at plasma.

I agree with Aido, my last 4 years worth of contracts have been SE S600i, K700, K750 and K850. Was a fan, but since i got my K850 in October i am now on my 4th, utter crap! i have lost faith It's funny you guys having trouble with the k850 - I've got a K850i and have had it since mid-january, and haven't had any trouble with it at all. My previous SE was a couple of years before (K600i I think!) and the joystick kept going wrong on it which was really annoying. Suddenly, you wouldn't be able to move it in one particular direction. It was only when I saw the 850 had moved to a button arrangement instead of the joystick that I considered them again. I'm glad I did - I've been pleased with it... The camera is superb - I've stopped using my proper camera now unless I know I'll need a proper zoom function. For standard snapping the camera in the phone (5MP) is more than adequate.

You sure the mouse is working OK? Have you tried another one?

Some of it is quite good IMHO, for example The Apprentice, but then (in theory at least) such programs have intelligent people competing for some sort of 'proper goal'. Trouble with BB is that there is no goal, so there is no actual competition. The producers know this and realise that to keep the viewers watching, they have to fill the house up with extrovert people chosen specifically for being likely to argue with each other. Throw in a couple of fitties, a gay one, a noisy one, and a really, really thick one, and the arguments will come and the viewer numbers will remain in the millions. It's all rather depressing, really. I don't like soap operas for the same reason - if you show the viewers enough rows, fights and arguments for long enough, soon they'll start to behave the same way as they believe it's normal behaviour. Then you end up with a society full of bad-mannered chavs.

Well thanks for all the replies guys, it seems like the Mac will definitely do what I want it to do (though will have to buy a new scanner, since the old one is 10 years old and requires an archaic SCSI card). I live near Kingston and there is a Mac store there, I know the staff are meant to be really helpful so I will go in and speak to them. I tend to keep stuff quite a long time (the Dell is a PIII 1GHz, and I threw out my previous PC only this weekend which was a 433MHz Celeron, so that should give you a clue as to how long I keep stuff running for!!) so I may as well spend a few pennies more upfront and get something really nice, hence the high spec I was looking at.

There's one near me too - a sort of burnt orange, rather than a Dayglo type. Not sure if it's an original paintjob, it's on a W plate so would be a very early one I think (or a cheap private plate!) Looks quite nice, but not sure I'd buy one in that colour!

It's a mess, to be honest. I think the answer depends on when you passed your test - definitely call the DVLA and ask... I wouldn't rely on the rental company knowing, and you could end up in prison and uninsured if the very worst should happen. Not that it will, of course, but it's a silly thing to take a risk on for the sake of a phone call.

... No, I'm not getting rid of the Lex. Or the R6, for that matter. But the old Dell in the lounge is getting decidedly tired and slow, and I can't be bothered to upgrade or rebuild it. It's 5 years old... And I've been thinking that since I only really use it for surfing the web and printing, I could replace it with an iMac and therefore get a much better looking machine which is far smaller than the current Dell box and 19" CRT monitor. I know that Tyger and one or two others here would rather eat their own grandmother than use a Microsoft machine, but the simple fact is that my Vista laptop 'just works' and with a little forethought and common sense, viruses can be avoided perfectly easily as well. So I don't buy into the 'Macs just work and PCs don't' argument too well. So the question is, am I gonna lose anything by moving to Apple? Only other thing I use the Dell for is as a print server, I assume i can use the iMac to do this as well? There are drivers for the printer on HPs site, so that shouldn't be a problem. And I can always use a virtualisation solution to run Windows if I need to (and I might well do, for work purposes, customer-provided VPN software etc). I'm looking at a 24"model (the screens are allegedly much superior to the 20" ones?), 2.8GHz chip, probably with a 500GB disk and 4GB RAM. Thoughts, anyone? Preferably not too rabid... :winky:

4WD it may be, but the engine is still way out back, and 4WD doesn't bend the rules of physics. A pendulum is still a pendulum now matter how many wheels are driven!!

Depends where you are - in a residential area with decently wide pavements you'll probably get away with it, especially with a cover on as they are not supposed to remove these to take the licence plate details. Is the lamppost close to the edge of the pavement? If it is, buy a decent length chain and park it in the road whenever possible, but loop the chain round the post. Buy a decent lock and chain too - go into a proper motorcycle dealer and spend £100 minimum, with Sold Secure tickets on it. You really, really need a quality product, and the £15 chains from B&Q or Halfords aren't good enough. Also, they won't be able to remove the scooter very easily with a chain like that on it!!

I'm just gonna keep mine as well. Unless you're racking up more than a few thousand miles a year, the extra petrol and tax isn't actually that much in the grand scheme of things. The loss in value of the car makes it much more expensive to sell it, than to look after it properly and feed it the fuel and tax discs! One of the (many) benefits of owning such a beautifully built car is that you can realistically keep it for a long time, which makes the overall cost of ownership lower than having a series of cheaper cars which collectively cost much more in depreciation. With the current climbdown over the 10p income tax rate, who thinks there is a chance they may backtrack on the tax disc rates as well?

This was discussed and has been comprehensively rebuffed by a number of people (not just on here either). Surely the answer lies in reducing sales taxes, not reducing the profits of commercial organisations, because these profits in themselves generate tax revenues. At the moment, Greedy Gord is on a big double-grab with both excessive sales taxes, and corporation tax on the profits, to pay for his vast armies of civil servants and beaurocrats... Here's an interesting fact - since 1997, there have been 500,000 additional people added to the government payroll. Who pays for them - us! Are public services noticeably better as a result? I don't think so...

Personally, I'd try and get to City airport as fast as poss and stick the bags in Left Luggage. Then you can go back into town on the DLR/Jubilee lines and kill some time in a more pleasant area without having to worry about all your kit. Just being nosy, but where are you flying to from City airport that you can't fly to from Heathrow?

I don't think they can go on the MOT testing, simply because MOTs don't test for CO2... You'd have to come up with some sort of formalised testing procedure. I think The Transporter is correct - they'll either rely on older cars fading away and being scrapped, or just do what Red Ken is trying to do with the congestion charge and just base it on either CO2 if available, or engine size if not.

...watching those arrogant, smug, complacent and incompetent fools in government getting the thorough kicking they so richly deserve. :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

You'd probably be best asking this on the US forums - we don't have the ES over here in the UK, so very people will have knowledge of it...

I've had a ticket for parking with two wheels on the kerb - quite a busy road with a lot of buses going up and down, but pavements were about 10 foot wide and very little pedestrian traffic. So I put the car about 2 foot onto the pavement and the cars went by all day... But I got a ticket for parking on the pavement. So next time, I parked it on the road and all day, there was a queue behind the car as they waited for some space in which to go past it. Money grubbing cretins, the lot of them.

The tax rates apply to cars registered after 1st March, but that's not when the Y reg stopped. Although the new year plates now get issued on 1st March (ie 08 plate cars were first issued on 1st March, when the 51 reg came out it was on the 1st August 2001. I'm caught like this - my car was registered in early May 2001 but is on a Y plate.

Sorry to drag off-topic, but when are you opening your new WIM centre, Tony? I still want my GS geometry checked, even though I spoke to you about it months and months ago!!!