McPhee

lol It's not really a problem, they're just not really worth installing. General rule of thumb for Windows these days, if it works without installing drivers then don't install the drivers. Windows has clean, simple drivers for most things built in so there's generally no point in the ones that come with products, they're usually bloated with useless features.

Another vote for not installing the drivers, they're a PITA and they add very little.

http://gamingweapons.com/choose-best-gaming-mouse/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqSGFQIcU_o The first two are a palm grip but with slightly different finger positions, the third is the claw/finger grip. Hope it's a help.

How do you hold a mouse? There's usually two types of grip, the full palm (where the mouse sits in your hand) and the finger grip (where the mouse tends to be gripped in, and moved by, your fingers). I can't remember where i read the explanation but it made sense and it's true. From this you can usually find the right mouse. Logitech tend to produce big mice that are suited to the palm grip, your whole hand can comfortably rest on the mouse. Razor usually pump out smaller mice that are more precise and easier to control with a finger grip but rather uncomfortable for those that like to use their whole hand. Personally i use a Logitech G5. It's near perfect for me, though as i have big hands it could do with being a little (10%?) longer and taller. EDIT: Oh, you're on glass. Glass desk? If it is then you might well need a mouse mat. Mechanical mice aren't really made any more, the technology was poop. However: http://channel.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=19839

Maybe he swings on Fridays? It happens, and well... who am I to judge? :p

I'm intrigued by this game. Not on my purchase list yet though, too short on monies at the moment. Only one i'm definitely buying is Assassin's Creed II (and Left4Dead 2 if i get my internets sorted). Guess i'll see what you lot think of it and decide from there.

Fair enough. The obvious answer is an iMac then, though I think you're barking mad either way. If you're desperate for more power than your existing Macbook then i don't think you'll really find it with either machine. I made the leap from a 1.9GHz Athlon X2 to a 2.5GHz Core2Duo this year. Well worth the money, but i only paid ~£30 for that extra performance. You're away to put down £hundreds (compared to just docking your Macbook) for a similar boost in power. I'm actually really surprised how crappy the spec of the iMacs are to be honest. Not wanting to start an argument here but you'd think that for £950 you'd at least get a bottom-end Core 2 Quad? What i'm really getting at with this is that they are so bad value for money that they're bound to get a pretty large upgrade fairly soon, playing the waiting game will pay off here i think.

Is the Macbook you've got a 1.83GHz Dual Core or a single? I doubt you'd see much of a performance bump between a 1.83GHz dual and a 2.16GHz dual but up to 2.66GHz would be quite a jump. Also, have you though about how much your existing Macbook could sell for? You might be able to sell that and use the money to get a higher spec'd Macbook or a seperate monitor, keyboard and mouse.

I'm interested in 3D PC gaming and 3D cinema. It just seems 'right' in those situations and for some reason a pair of glasses seems like less of an obstacle. For the rest i'm thinking it's a no. I don't want to be sprawled out on my bed with a pair of glasses uncomfortably sticking in to my face, it's one of the reasons i now ware contacts. Then there's the little issue of the 42" Plasma TV and Blu-Ray player i bought last year. I can't see me replacing either for a LONG time, they set me back well in excess of a grand!

Not so sure myself, either a spambot or just an over enthusiastic newbie. Will leave it for now, it's not like he's doing any harm

With a week to go you're going to be better off buying a pre-built. Learning to build a PC in the space of a week, buying the correct parts, putting it all together etc. is possible but it doesn't leave a lot of time to solve any problems that pop up. Even companies like Dino-PC will struggle to assemble a PC and ship it to you for Friday/Saturday if you ordered it tomorrow (they'll do it, but they'll charge a lot extra for a fast build and then more for fast delivery). Having said that i've heard bad things about these Zoo Storm machines and it's difficult to find decent quality pre-built machines at a fair price so maybe it would be worthwhile trying to cram a build in to a single week? Not knowing what you want the machine for makes things difficult, but you can't really go wrong with the following for a base; AMD Phenom II X3 720 (~£90) Asus M4A785TD-V EVO (~£70) 4GB Corsair DDR3 RAM (~£65) 1TB Samsung EcoGreen F2 (~£50) All from Scan (and next day delivery is free for AVForums and Hexus.net members). Then get the case, PSU and GPU from eBuyer. 512MB ATi 4850 (~£75) Coolermaster 330 Case/CM eXtreme Power 460W PSU combo (~£60) Prices from those stores fluctuate daily (especially on Scan, see the "Today Only" page) which is why i've just popped ball park figures up. What course is it you're doing and are you looking to game on the PC?

It'll work once you have the right cables. The Xbox 360's VGA cable has 2 RCA cables (red + white) for sound. To hook these up to your speakers you need a female RCA to female 3.5mm headphone jack. You could also do with a female 3.5mm to 2x male 3.5mm cable so you don't have to keep swapping the speaker cable over between 360 and PC.

That's not what it says at all. It says that it will be US-only for the time being and that they are "looking at potential future hardware experiences for these markets, but do not have anything to announce right now.". That literally just says that at the moment it is US only and they currently have nothing to announce for other territories. What did Ars expect? An email back with dates about a roll-out? If it flops in the US we won't see it. If it does well I bet it's over here by next Christmas.

You're right, got my bits and my bites the wrong way round. 186kbps, which I still pretty poor. Speedtest.net has that as below average for domestic standards, never mind business.

That's what I thought. Then I looked on the Apple site and while the 8GB is only £150 there's now no 16GB and the 32GB is £230. To make it more annoying the 8GB doesn't have the new hardware. While it's nice to see a price drop i'm more than a little disappointed, £230 is that little bit too much but 8GB isn't enough storage and the faster hardware will always be a boon. I wonder if we'll get a date on the Zune HD any time soon? Buying a new touch is looking less likely

But most can do better than 25kbps, especially given this is corporate broadband rather than home. The pigeon winning was inevitable even on a decent connection. It shouldn't have won by such a distance though, the guy could have cycled there and done the whole lot himself in under the 10 hours it'd take that connection to upload the file

I never had a problem with Vista either really, I always thought the positives outweighed the negatives (after I got rid of my old laptop, which was a bit slow and had too little RAM to run Vista properly). Aside from the UI upgrades Windows 7 isn't a huge leap from Vista. All they really did was tweak the performance to make it run smoother, tie UAC back to a point where people will stop bitching about it and then add a few new features like native SSD support, Playto and Sendto. There's also better networking support in the form of Homegroups. As for Windows laptop suggestions, try the Dell Studio XPS 13 and Adamo, Sony TT and TZ and the Lenovo T400. Of those the two Dells are 13" models, the two Sonys are 11" models and the Lenovo is 14".

After the recent improvements in Vista and Windows 7 I wouldn't really say the worries you posted about Windows are all that relevant. They certainly aren't to me anyway, I don't have an AV running (i do a scan twice a year and haven't had any problems since moving from XP to Vista), I use Windows Firewall, I've not defragged my hard drives in ages (just done a scan and I'm up to 18% fragmentation which is no big deal) and I've not had a crash caused by Windows in a long time (I've caused plenty myself though from fiddling with BIOS settings and hardware). Microsoft do have a bit of work to do on the adware front though. I've not had any harmful adware infect my computer since I left XP but Spybot does still pick up the odd thing here and there. From a stability and maintenance point of view I can't really see much in it. Both operating systems are perfectly capable of surviving alone without any 3rd party software installed. If anything OS X probably copes a little better, counterbalanced by better 3rd party software support on Windows. Even Apple's old ace in the hole, iLife, isn't as much of a selling point as it used to be. Microsoft have their own very similar package in Windows Live Essentials, the only thing missing is a Garage Band alternative. The Macbook Pro is a cracking choice of laptop but personally I think it has far better plus points than the fact it runs OS X, it's an alternative OS these days rather than a superior one. You can do that. If I open (for example) Live Picture Gallery and grab a photo i can drag it in to Paint, Word or any number of other programs. I can even do it without the program being open, just drag it on to the icon. Not being able to do it from a browser is just down to that browser lacking that feature. I'm using Chrome at the moment which won't do it. Which critics do those be then? I'd honestly like to know, it's always good to get a bit more perspective and some times people notice things that others don't. Most reviews I've been reading on Snow Leopard and Windows 7 put them both at an even level (which from my experiences with Leopard and Windows 7 I can definitely believe). It's less a case of which one is better and more a case of which one you prefer. I know that I feel lost in OS X and I find my productivity falls due to the keyboard shortcuts being different. From my own experiences I know I could likely learn to love OS X (and I certainly wouldn't mind running it on my own machines so I could get more used to it) but I don't really think I have any need to when I already get on fine with Windows.

He's a student, he gets the Macbook at educational prices (thus undercutting competing laptops) and he can get a free (or at least very cheap) copy of Windows 7 through the MSDNAA. If he wasn't a student it'd be insane, but under the circumstances it works out very good value against something similarly priced (like a Dell Studio XPS 13) and a lot cheaper than Lenovo's T400 (which is the machine the MBP 13" is usually compared against).

You could always buy the MBP and a copy of Windows and run Windows on it. Even without OS X it's one of the best laptops on the market and it'd give you a chance to decide which OS you prefer.

It's something down the lines of clear a whole round in a single combo. Bloomin nails to pull off, i usually wind up with all of the enemies lying on the ground - instant combo breaker (unless anyone knows how to combo in a ground takedown?)

It really is a bit sad when you think about it. A cheapo HDMI cable probably costs less than a quid for MS, Sony etc. I never understand how they can be excluded on cost cutting grounds.

Most people claim that DVDs upscaled on a £40 ASDA DVD player look as good as Blu-Rays too, it doesn't mean they're right. The bulbs used in cinema projectors cost more than all of the TV kit in the average UK living room. You claim that this kit is able to produce a better picture from the sub-par quality of a DVD than a cinema projector drawing from raw 35mm film and projecting on to a high-gain 50' cinema screen? A good £10k worth of kit vs <£1k. How exactly do you measure picture quality? Because you seem to spend an aweful lot of time harping on about resolution rather than the things that matter (like colour reproduction). This point is further emphasised by your stupidity in insisting that DVDs look nicer than a film shown at a cinema. DVDs are notoriously bad in terms of colour accuracy, they can't even manage a half convincing black for a start (try watching something like The Dark Knight on Blu-Ray and then on DVD, or an episode of 24 and you'll see what i mean).

It is kinda common sense. I took the HDD out of my Acer laptop every time it went for repair (all 5 times, steer clear of Travelmates). You should really wipe any hard drives using specialist tools before returning to a shop/selling on/sending to the dump, otherwise some smart sod is always going to get to your data. However it doesn't excuse the store from blame. On a legal standing it was them that screwed up. As people have said, Citizens Advice Bureau. It'd also have been helpful if you could stop this guy taking the laptop back to the shop, it's a vital piece of evidence. He could probably sue on the same court case.

How'd you like that? Easy enough to do, even got the Quick Launch bar back. While the Windows Classic look is gone this one remains possible (along with various hybrids of the two). Personally i prefer the Win7 task bar though, it almost negates any need for a start menu. Got mine side docked with most of the programs i use in it. There's a few games that aren't but I launch them through Steam anyway (which is sat in the system tray, hopefully they update it soon to take advantage of the live view stuff in Win7).