Fmrl

When my car was having a service at Lexus Leeds I was chatting to one of the drivers as he dropped me off at my office. He mentioned that the engineers at Lexus Bradford were a load of rubbish! Anyway, my IS sometimes has the "clunk" (mostly when cold and when trying to change up too quickly) - something I noticed when I bought the car, and something passengers have mentioned to me occasionally too. The sales chap who sold me the car said something to the effect of "it's a feature of the IS200". I've had someone in servicing tell me the same thing - is there a Lexus conspiracy going on here? Just wondering - does your gearstick vibrate a bit too? Even when in neutral? I've sort of learned to live with the "clunk" but it's definitely made me think twice about getting another Lexus - not really because it's such a big problem or anything, it's just the dealer's attitude.

I thought it was always best to go for Z's

I've bought Fuldas before (not for an IS though). Seemed okay, reasonable grip and lasted a fair while too. The guy who fitted them to my car mentioned something about the fact that Fulda are actually owned Goodyear.

Good for you. I think what the biker did to your car is inexcusable and he needs a good talking to. IMHO anyone who condones this type of "roadside justice" is just asking for trouble.

I was watching that Traffic Cops programme on BBC last night and they mentioned a really frightening statistic... Motorcycles account for only 1% of road traffic but motorcyclists account for 20% of road fatalities.

There's a view option within mime that'll only display games that you've downloaded the roms for (some sort of directory scan utility?). Have you tried that? I think the rom zip file needs to be in the same directory as the mame executable (and/or maybe in the "roms" directory beneath it?). My copy of mame is an old version and on another pc so I can't be 100% on this, sorry.

I think MAME is brilliant. It can get a bit annoying at times though when it says you don't have the right rom files.

If possible, go for a sandwich degree course - I found that extra year working for a company as part of the course really helps.

Hit it repeatedly with a large hammer? Might not fix the problem but it sure makes you feel a lot better.

But isn't an AA chap bound to say that? :duh:

Oooh, one of these beauties was it?...

Someone got married maybe?...

One of these then?

Was it one of these?...

Okay, lets go for the blatently obvious one first - your IS200?

I hope not - I jump started my neighbours Merc the other week!

How do they get them through the letterbox? :duh:

I'd be a bit wary of someone trying to sell a car after they've only had it for a couple of months.

Yep, I know they're not restricted (though when I see a rent-a-van bombing down the outside lane of the motorway at 100+ I sometimes wish they were!!). Some larger vehicles don't seem to be restricted either (does the same rule apply to foreign vehicles? What about lorries with empty trailers?). I'm always considerate of lorry drivers but I think the majority of lorry drivers attitudes have changed over the years. Maybe there's a lot of bad car drivers about now but that's no excuse for lorry drivers behaving badly too - if I was driving a big hgv I'd be a LOT more considerate of others (mainly because of the greater amount of damage they can cause compared to a car). And why do some hgv drivers like to drive about 1 inch from your rear bumper when the roads are busy? Only this morning I was travelling into work - I was in the middle lane overtaking a lorry, he decides to overtake a lorry infront, starts to pull out, then sees me having to brake hard in his mirror, then puts on his indicator (like that makes it okay!). I always overtake with caution now - I've seen a couple of close calls where a car in the middle lane has nearly become a sandwich. I'm not saying ALL lorry drivers behave like this - it just seems like bad driving is becoming more commonplace.

So there were cars in the left hand lane as well? The cars in the middle lane were overtaking but just not as fast as you would have liked?

...until you hurt or kill someone... then it's not quite so much fun

Lorries are not like cars where you can accelerate away,they are(supposed to be)restricted to 56mph....Lorries cant always move over to the middle lane. And anyway dont the broken white lines at the end of the slip road mean "GIVE WAY"..... Okay... what I'm specifically on about here is - stationary/crawling traffic, cars coming onto the motorway from a slip road, lorry drivers could leave a bit of a gap to let other road users onto the motorway, lorry driver doesn't, car driver is stuck waiting for lorry to pass, lorry behind that does the same thing, and the lorry behind that, etc. large queue of cars line up on the slip road causing congestion, drivers at the back of the queue then start queue jumping, etc. Seen it happen loads of times. The lorry drivers that leave a gap aren't really inconvenienced as most of the time the car driver would just pull out into the middle lane. Okay, they car drivers should give way, but there is such a thing as "consideration" - like the drivers who get tired of waiting on busy roundabout junctions and just set off in the hope that whoever is already on the roundabout will give way to them!! Has there been a relaxation on restrictions? Most lorries seem to go a lot faster these days. I've seen a couple of nasty accidents involving HGVs (7.5Ts), minbuses, transits and the like - junction 25 on the m62 last Friday being an obvious example.

Ah right, I thought it was the other way round (ie. enforced by the government to prevent mot testing stations competing with each other and risk cutting corners on the test). I stand corrected.

I never bother with the wizards - can't see the point of them to be honest. I use w98 and w2k at home so I don't think I've come across the 'simple file sharing' check box. I'm guessing it's some sort of backward compatibility option (between 98/nt/2k and xp maybe?). I don't think it would do any harm to switch it on. I'm a bit "old skool" with PCs - first thing I'd do is open a DOS command prompt and ping the other PCs and the router to make sure everything can see each other, make sure the drives are shared, check that there's no firewalling or anything running on the machines, etc.

One interesting point - AFAIK it's an offence to undertake but not to sit in the middle lane (just bad driving practice). To be honest, I don't think it's that big a problem. If the right hand lane is clear then why not just overtake them? Flashing just annoys other drivers and undertaking can be dangerous. I've chilled out a lot since I bought my IS200 :)