McPhee

LG are fairly mediocre, this years top of the line range looks cool but really isn't a match for the big boys (Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, Philips and Pioneer). Samsung? Yeah they're pretty good, not 'King', but good. Sony are probably the 'King' of LCDs right now, great sets right the way across the range! They're beaten by Philips at the top end, but then again Philips' top of the line sets cost HUNDREDS more than Sony's. Oh, and that Sammy ain't 1080p, it just accepts a 1080p feed and then downscales it to 768p. I'd recommend the Sony V4000. £359.95 for the 26" version at Richer Sounds But the 32" version is available from the same shop for a mere £10 more. If i were you i'd take some measurements and work out if you can squeeze the 32" version in, because that is a real bargain! Ask over at http://www.avforums.com for impressions of the set, i'd expect you'll get a lot of recommendations.

That'll be handy. I had a few complaints, especially about the lengths of the thread titles which is why i took the action that i did. Merging the threads was the easiest option, looked at others but it was going to be messy/time consuming. TBH it'd be pretty good if you could start topics for the individual games too It'll bring some discussion out of the Playstation thread.

I've merged all your new threads Choze. Didn't read through them really so if you have a problem with it then PM me and we'll come up with a solution. If you'd like to then please feel free to make individual topics for these games. Just keep the titles short (i.e. just the title of the game)

You think £50 is expensive? Never looked in a Hi-Fi/Home Cinema magazine, have you? :p It's the price of cables that motivated me to upgrade my 360 to a 60GB HDMI model, i could upgrade and buy a decent 5m HDMI cable for the same price as the Component cables i'd have needed to hook everything up to my projector (coming next week). Sainsburys have been selling games consoles cheap for the past week. Xbox 360 Arcade: £99.97 Xbox 360 Pro (60GB): £139.97 Nintendo Wii: £149.97 The offer is on until Sunday. I'm staff, so 10% off those prices

It doesn't matter a huge amount, signal loss on digital cables is pretty low. A £50 cable will be better than a £5 one, but not to the same extent it was on component etc. So basically, spend whatever you want to

I think you'd be suprised at how fast Sony could potentially recoup those losses. It's not a lot of money really, if they take £1 per film and penetrate 20% of the home movie market then they'll be making profit from Blu-Ray in 5 years time. Add in game sales and sales as a storage medium, and chuck in the PS3's revenues and that time could be cut down as low as 3 years. Also, what i mean by the "casual" coment is that some people bought a PS3 as a multimedia platform. DVD, Blu-Ray, Games, video and music streaming, photo viewing, the internet. All available through the PS3 with the minimum of fuss. I was defining the "casual" part as being someone who puts no more importance on the console's games playing abilities than they do it's media capabilities. Light gaming, basically. This is in contrast to the Wii, which is bought for the sole reason of playing video games. It's bought by gamers, even if those people wouldn't have fallen under the definition of a "gamer" in the past.

AAHAHAHAHA. No way? Seriously? I can't wait to see the reaction if they do. Imaging the GameFAQs forums!

To get CPU-Z to show the actual speed of an AMD chip you need to load the chip, otherwise it goes in to power saving mode. That's why it's showing up as 1GHz. SuperPi is the tool normally used to overload a CPU, calculating Pi to a billion decimal places tends to get the CPUs moving; http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=36

I was moving out of my parents house at some point this year. It now looks like i'm staying put. It'd be insane for me to move out when costs are set to rise to an unknown level at an unknown rate. On the bright side though it does mean i have money to burn, and with retail competition being fierce at the moment i should be able to bag a few good deals on kit i'm after Only an idiot keeps more than £35,000 in a single account with a single bank. If you ain't mentally derranged then your money is safe

Losses of over $1.25 billion on the PS3, but just think how much money they stand to gain with Blu-Ray Sony used the PS3 to force their Blu-Ray platform on to the market, from the get-go they didn't care about how much money they lost on the machine. Now that Blu-Ray is the next generation standard they'll start to look at reducing the cost of the machine to get it in to more people's homes. Once they have done that it'll catch on pretty quickly as a multimedia device. A rather shocking fact, but in some areas of the market the PS3 is the ultimate casual gamer's console. Take a look over at AVForums, so many nice set-ups and so many of them have a PS3 for "Blu-Ray and the occasional video game". Over the next couple of years i expect this is the route Sony will take, they'll push it as a Blu-Ray player AND a games machine, with neither aspect being more important. Microsoft won't launch a new platform for ages, it makes no sense to. Neither of their competitors can afford to advance their hardware far past the current 360/PS3 mark. Such hardware would be too expensive for Nintendo, and would alienate them again (this time for being too powerful, they'd get a lot of upscaled PS3/360 games). Sony won't be looking for another platform until they know if they can turn the PS3 in to a success or not, it's far too early to admit defeat. Just to make this quick point. An 'Upscaling Wii' seems to get mentioned a lot, but i wonder if anyone actually realises how useless one would be? HDTVs already have a built in upscaler. You'll find that the benefits of upscalers in £500 AV Recievers is highly debatable, so the sort of chip you'd find in a £180 games console is gonna be next to useless in a half decent TV set. Having said that though, people do swear that they can see a difference when using 'upscaling' DVD players, so maybe there is some truth in the myth. Personally i'd put it down to the benefit of digital cabling rather than the effects of a cheap scaler. Maybe a Wii with a DVI port would be worth a try (HDMI is HD-Only, you can put anything through DVI).

I thought i'd take a quick look at what Archos are churning out this year, and all i have to say is, WOW! Access the internet anywhere through the 3G network (HSDPA speeds! ) 5", 480x800 touchscreen The 800 pixel wide screen allows web browsing without the need for scrolling right/left or zoom Full flash support in browser, allowing websites like YouTube to run exactly as they would on a PC! Internet TV and Radio out of the box Download movies, TV-shows, documentaries, music and games through media club, straight to your Archos 5 from anywhere in the world Full video support for the following codecs: MPEG-4 AVI MJPEG WMV H.264 AAC MPEG-2 WMV HD MPEG-4 HD [*]Full audio support for the following codecs: MP3 WMA Protected WMA WMA 5.1 WAV AAC3 AAC+ AC3 [*]Using the DVR Dock Record live TV, including a full EPG for Terrestrial, Satellite, Freeview and Cable Access to everything you can do on the Archos 5, but through your TV screen. This includes movie playback (up to 720p), media streaming from your PC, web browsing and internet TV! 5.1 surround sound Remote control with built in keyboard and mouse pointer [*]Full GPS using the Car Holder add-on [*]Many other add-ons, including a helmet cam and a TV tuner They've pulled out all the stops this time, i guess they're feeling the burn with the iPod Touch and countless mobile phones stepping on their toes. If i can get it with a data contract then i may well buy one instead of a new phone

Ah, it's graded. Hadn't realised. The LE26R73 is a year older than the R88 though, so it's even more discontinued. The other model you linked to is likely the worst of the bunch, the look of it and the model number both suggest that it's the very bottom model of this year's Samsung range. It's made for volume selling in supermarkets and other similar places, I'd place a bet that it isn't even made by Samsung and is simply a rebadged TV! (common practice at the bottom end of the market, a lot of sets are either rebadged or are converted computer monitors). Your best bet is probably this: http://www.pixmania.co.uk/uk/uk/974719/art/samsung/le26a456c-le26a457-lcd-te.html?srcid=867 The R88 is the best of the bunch, as many on here would testify to, but the A456 is pretty good too. It's also in better supply than the R88 and available new.

The last one you posted is the best Mr Dwarf Pretty good deal!

Problem solved. It's America, they're all fucked up over there. In all seriousness though maybe the kid simply thought he was feeding the croc? I doubt he had any idea what he was feeding it. As for the beaten Lizards, i guess he tried to grab them and they pissed him off somehow. Sever year-olds can throw pretty good temper tantrums.

I thought Fallout 3 was the week after? Still, a pretty packed day!

Just got back from work. Bought me a brand new 60GB 360 for £126! Bargain, or what?!?!!? My old console is going to my bro, he left for uni today so it's being sent up with the rest of his stuff 2moz.

I never thought i'd see anything worse than 'The Brit Awards'. I was wrong. Vote: Rick Astley, 2008!

I quite like the fact it doesn't ship with online co-op, if it did then that's the mode i'd jump to straight away! This way i'll complete it on my own, and then with a mate

Firefox + NoScript = problem solved. Most of the leakes are in the browsers, unless you're in to downloading dodgy shiz. I used to run Spybot a couple of times a week and always got results, now i run it once a month and never have problems. I also don't have a firewall or anti-virus. Windows firewall is sufficient and i've not been stung by a virus in years. But yeah, i'd rather not have to do these things. It's not so much a chore, but i would rather have everything automated. Maybe set the OS up so that Anti-Virus/Spyware can be installed behind the scenes and ran on a schedule completely determined by Windows. Basically make the programs almost invisible, with no effort needed on the part of the user.

I'm up for some Gears when my new setup arrives, im TV-less. Ordering a HD Projector, Yamaha amp and a set of Q Acoustics speakers this week though. 80" gaming with £600-worth of audio glory!

They'll re-do the UI near the end of the development cycle, it won't look like Vista when it's done. They'll probably continue the look of the Paint and Wordpad screenies across the whole OS.

Curse you! Villain!

1080i sets don't exist, LCDs can't be interlaced. As for what to buy, go for a PC monitor. It's the best you'll get for that price, these "TVs" actually are PC monitors anyway, but you're paying for a TV tuner and a couple of pretty rubbish internal speakers. A decent PC monitor with a decent set of Logitech speakers and a 360 VGA cable will wipe the floor with anything else for under £200. This, for instance; http://scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=688560 http://scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=745801 http://scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductId=298854