Mike_B

Can I ask where you got the towbar from? Am quite interested in fitting one to my GS430, which I assume would be the same towbar...

well we will pay for other peoples holidays and new trainers fred perry tops etc people who work full time always pay their taxes never claim any benifits these kinda people always get shafted.... chap in my street doesnt work and has 4 kids and drives 07 plate galaxy...when i see him i wonder why the hell im working like a dog and paying for his house and galaxy.....it really makes me wonder some time...why the hell bother working just make 4-5 babies and sit on your arse and chill...somone else can pay for my house and car..... what really pisses me off...i live in 2 bed house and drive R reg Lexus and work like a bitch......but my neighbour does feck all and lives in 3 bed house and drives 07 plate car... :tsktsk: perfect and well said But nothing whatever to do with the rights and wrongs of having your debts, which you presumably freely entered into, written off on an obscure technical quirk in otherwise perfectly reasonable law... Think of it like this: why should I pay more for any loans I might want, because you don't feel you should have to pay yours back? Are you going to share with me the extra money you'll now have at the end of each month?

Surely it would have been easier and cheaper to stick the spare key in a jiffy bag and send it Special Delivery? Guaranteed before 9.30am, and would have cost about £5. Much cheaper than travelling from Aberbeen to Sunderland, whatever means of transport she's using?

Gonna stand out a bit here I think, but I quite like the E-Class Mercs. Had a ride in one yesterday from the office to the airport which was nice - proper dark windows limo-style one!! But then I suppose the GS is pretty similar really, my GS430 is much more of a contender to an E420 than a BMW 540i.

Easy... Do I win a prize for being quick? :)

Do you have Virgin TV as well? Whenever I see my internet connection playing up, I look at the cable TV box. There is a green light on there which flashes, if it's lost connection to the 'net, which means it's probably a network problem. If the TV box looks fine and you can access stuff like On Demand (which uses IP over the network, same as your internet modem), then it's either your cable modem or your router which is giving you grief. I think you can get decent cable routers for about £30 these days, might not be a bad idea to get a newer one anyway so you can take advantage of WPA2 security at the same time.

If it's 'warm' and sunny (like this weekend) then I'll use the sunroof. If it's 'hot' and sunny, then I'll use the AC. I'll use the AC for most other situations, too. But if it's sunny and 15-20 C, then the sun is lovely coming down on your face. I quite like having both, but if I had to choose, I'd pick AC any day. How much is it to have it fitted as an option on a new car, anyway? A few hundred quid I think I would pay, but not if it was thousands...

Already done!!! :)

Seriously, DO NOT start shelling out money for programs like whatever it is you've been looking at. Like Stevie says, 99% of the time they are just a scam anyway. Many of them deliberately break things with the free version, and then fix it again once you've paid up.

Someone has to, I suppose! Looks pig ugly to me, so you can keep it Rolex!!!

There are a number of very prolific viruses that cause this issue as well. Are you sure you're not infected with one of them? For example, are you able to manually go to http://update.microsoft.com in Internet Explorer? If not, it could be a problem with one of those viruses, as they actively block attempts to download updates which might get rid of them... There are ways to get rid, however.

Sounds like it might have been using NTSC for the PS3 connection? Did you not get an engineer to install the V+ box? When I ordered mine, admittedly a few months ago now, it was mandatory to have an installation job done by them; he got mine working properly in no time, though I do have a more modern TV.

It's true that the nutrition of the food probably is no worse than at many other chains. The reason McDonalds gets such a bad rap is because they go out of their way to encourage kids to go there - giving away toys with the kids meals, big clown figures everywhere etc. They rely on 'pester power' of kids to get families with young kids in there, and once they have you hooked on their salty, fatty, junk food, you're likely to regularly go there for years. It's also a global organisation, far more so than KFC or Burger King etc. That makes them the symbol of US cultural imperialism, hence McD's always being the centre of any anti-globalisation protests anywhere with even vaguely anti-US sentiments.

I can see one way in which it might be useful, namely that you could use a system that splits the water from the energy used in braking. With conventional brakes, the kinetic energy is converted to heat and therefore wasted. If you could use it to power your water splitter, then it would be effectively free? Drive systems which combine petrol and electric drive are very well proven now (and Toyota/Lexus have some of the best), so the only extra bits would be the different braking system and the fuel cell to power the motors, instead of a chunky battery pack.

My binmen are useless too. They keep knocking over a small brick wall which forms part of the perimeter of the car park at our flats. Trouble is when you call the council, they won't take responsibility unless you make a note of the reg number of the truck which came - they say they can't claim on their insurance without knowing which vehicle it was. :(

I love the noise as much as anything. It's not so much 'hearing' them, more like 'feeling' them!!! Awesome!!

Yes, I'm sure you're right - they will be most of the way there already. And if they aren't, I should think the team bosses will be more than a little upset about the lack of planning for that eventuality!

Yeah, so is my Breitling, officially. Except, it would appear, for magnets of that power!!! I shan't be letting one get close to it again, that's for sure... The urban legends suggest you can use these magnets to silently disable things like electricity and gas meters, too... The theory is that they pull on metal components so strongly that they no longer rotate freely in their bearings (which aren't designed to resist that sort of treatment). Then they let the electricity or gas flow through but the little wheels and cogs are all locked up and don't move the numbers round... This is, obviously, highly illegal!!!

You can buy ones from Lakeland which expand and contract to fit any size oven. Not sure how much they are, but I doubt they are 25 quid each...

Be careful with those magnets - they really are powerful. Two of them can snap together and catch your fingers painfully. They also made my (rather expensive) mechanical watch run 10 minutes fast per day, until I sent it back to be recalibrated. Not sure quite how it managed that, but it did!! Must have moved something inside I guess.

You don't say where the buzzing is coming from... if it's from the socket on the wall, then it's probably a poor connection in it, and when you draw too much current through it, the tiny contact area (instead of a good, solid screwed in connection) starts to arc. That's definitely the first thing to check. None of that stuff should draw a great deal of power, though, so it's unlikely you're actually overloading it, just drawing too much for a poor contact.

I don't much like automatic anything, apart from the gearbox. IMO, if you can't work out when to turn the lights and wipers on, you shouldn't be on the road!! ;)

I'm not sure - I called Lexus Guildford, Hatfield and Croydon about a minor (7-year) service on my GS430. They all wanted something like £500-600 for it, which I thought was excessive. I don't know what they'd charge for an IS, and I shudder to think what they'd charge for a major service!!

I think it's not so much the relative value, it's more that it's the going rate for insurance anyway. What I mean is this: the young un's could pay £700 a year to insure a Saxo worth £1500. Or, they could pay £1000 to insure a Lexus worth £3500. They have to pay £700 for insurance anyway, so may as well pay a bit more and get a nicer car to drive round in.

Yeah, I used to use my PC as a fax machine. They're not all that smart though - basically you need to get to the phone before it does, otherwise it will try and answer it. Depending on what software you have, it will answer it like an answerphone, and if it detects the beeping noise of an incoming fax, will switch to fax mode and accept it for you. Be warned though, once the computer has answered it, you won't be able to pick up the phone and talk to them as it will carry on regardless taking a message or trying to receive the fax. Unless the software has got a lot more advanced - which I doubt! Basically, in order for it to work, the PC must answer the call itself. So not very useful in your scenario of having the PC detect the fax after you've lifted the handset on another extension!