McPhee

I could point you in the direction of places on the net to buy each of those for cheaper than that if you wish?

The reasoning is simple: unused RAM is a waste of money. It's nice to see that only 500MB of your 2GB of RAM is being used, but im sure most people would rather have a system that runs smoother.

Vista scales itself depending on how much RAM the system has and what applications are open. You can run the same number of programs simultaniously in Vista as you can in XP because as the RAM fills up Vista starts caching to the Hard Drive instead of the RAM. XP just caches to the hard drive, which is a lot slower. With the price of RAM dropping all the time it's a lot more sensible to buy 2GB and upgrade to 4GB if you need it. Most people find that they don't. Best to play it safe on the OS though, buy Vista x64 so you have the option of upgrading to 4GB if you did need it.

You are an idiot. Sorry, i don't want to insult you but that post is 90% stupid. Yes, like every other commodity the price of oil is determined by supply and demand, but the idea behind this scheme is as a loyalty card. Basically the members of this scheme would be increasing a petrol company's revenues by all purchasing from the same company. In return they are after a small cut of the profit in the form of a discount. That makes perfect sense. There is a HUGE amount of profit in Petrol and Diesel! To give you an idea, the Venezuelan gouvernment can supply petrol to it's people at 5p/litre. They charge for manufacture and distribution costs, nothing more. Add on to that the price of the raw oil ($138.14/bbl or $1.16/litre, £0.59/litre) and the extra distribution costs for shipping it over here and you still won't be anywhere near the 20p/litre mark. The remaining £1 or so per litre is profit and tax. The slice of that "profit" that the goverment snatches comes back to benefit us. The slice that the oil companies take doesn't. The tax on fuel, alcohol and tobacco is going up because consumers are spending less, meaning the government is getting less from VAT. Do you have a better way for them to get the money? I do think that the petrol tax and car tax increases are a tad unfair on business travel though. Personally i think that if your business depends on transport then you should be getting a little bit of tax relief (im talking about haulage companies here, not someone driving from Brum to London for a meeting. He/she can get the train instead)

To be fair it doesn't "make the government money". It moves money in to this countries coffers to fund everything from the NHS to the roads and the police service. Nobody is making profit on it (or they shouldn't be in an ideal, corruption free world)

You'd be well advised to buy a better power supply as well. Personally i'd look at a better quality case and keyboard, there's no substitute for good build quality. Are you looking for a quiet system? Because there's a few parts you could swap around to make your system quieter (i.e. near silent)

I don't think Ramar was trying to say that people in rural areas should walk lol. It's far too impractical. On the other hand people who drive for trips under 2 miles are just lazy. A half hour walk will do you good, and unless you're doing the weekly shop or transporting other heavy goods there's no reason for driving it.

Yeah, things are changing all the time, but these aren't the normal (minor) changes that happen every few months. The sort of changes that Intel are making at the end of this year only occur once every 2 years though. Nehalem is a whole new processor architecture, new CPUs and motherboards (neither of which will work with the current Core components) and DD3 RAM will be standard. In English: Pentium 4 was replaced by Core, which was a HUGE step up. Nehalem is Core's replacement. That's the sort of change that is less than 6 months away. If you plan on keeping your system up to date with components then buying a Core right now would be a waste of money. Come upgrade time you'd have 2 choices, get a minimal performance boost by moving from one Core processor to another or spend hundreds upgrading to Nehalem.

Component usually gives a better picture than VGA and doesn't suffer the same scaling issues that VGA can. VGA is a bit sharper though and you can use your 360 for upscaling DVDs via VGA. Personally i would just hook the 360 up via component and the Wii via RGB. VGA is hit and miss depending on the set.

Damn straight, was just away to point that out. I know plenty of people who live in and around my nearest town that drive everywhere. Hell, one lad at work got a taxi the other day for the half mile from the bowling alley to our store! WALK! It ain't difficult. As for this system, the idea is to go to one of the major pertol retailers in the country and say "we have 2 million people signed up and prepared to only buy petrol from you if the price is right. What can you offer us?". It should work if enough people sign up, all that garaunteed business for the price of 5p a litre is a bargain for the petrol companies.

Here's an idea; phone the hostel, tell them you want a group of us to be booked in to the same room and ask if you can get a group reference. Book your bed, post the reference up on here and let people sort their beds out themselves. Just to check, you did get my PM, yes?

I would hold off building for now, new ATi cards just around the corner, new nVidia ones coming towards the end of the year and a new Intel socket type in the autumn. Not the best time to be buying or building a computer really, too much change going on over the next few months

Oh come on, give Treyarch a chance. They've produced a single CoD game, one that was actually pretty good (although not a patch on 2 or 4). I'm not expecting anything like the sort of quality found in Call Of Duty 4, but it'll still be worth the purchase price. Why is everyone so melodramatic around here at the moment? Is it the weather or something?

Yup. My bets are on McCain, have been for months

The GC for me. Rogue Squadron 2, Smash Bros Melee, Timesplitters 2 and Skies Of Arcadia: Legends are 4 of my favourite games of all time. There were other enjoyable titles too, Eternal Darkness, Pikmin, Wave Race, Luigi's Mansion, Tony Hawk 3 & 4, Wind Waker, Metroid Prime and Mario Sunshine also ate up hours of my life. Compare this to the Wii and there's not really anything that has kept my interest. Ghost Squad is fun for a quick blast, Fire Emblem was good (although i got bored about half way through and i'm yet to pick it up again), Brawl was OK and Zelda: TP is pretty much on a par with the other Zelda games in my book (never really been a big Zelda fan). Having said that though i've only played 4 Wii games + Wii Sports so i can't really judge. While i don't see it topping the Gamecube i do have high expectations for Galaxy and Prime 3 (when i get around to playing them).

Personally i think you'd be mad to buy a 26" with the relatively small jump in price from a 26" to a 32". http://www.hotukdeals.com/item/194142/32-samsung-le32a436t1d-lcd-tv-inc-d/

Hang on, don't the US have different PS3 models? 60GB or something? How many USB ports are on that?

The only thing i can think of is the Gamespot incident. I asked some users to stop firing personal attacks at a certain Gamespot reviewer in the thread about him losing his job for refusing to bias a review for cash. Nobody got banned, but the threat was definitely there. I've not banned a single forum user. Not a single one. BTW, if you're right on the over a year ago thing then it wasn't me, i've only just hit the one year marker. Sums up my post beautifully. It was meant ironically, that's exactly how i feel going in to the Wii board at the moment. If you discuss things sensibly and have constructive debates then i clearly wasn't aiming at you, i don't dislike most Wii board members I'm sorry if my post was misinterpreted. I think the reason people refer to Gears is because it set the standard. You don't have to be the first to do something if you're the first to do it really well. Think about it like this; people say BG&E is a lot like Zelda, but was Zelda the first of it's kind?

AFAIK the 360 gets a hub because all the instruments are wired and there aren't enough USB ports for all of them. The PS3's guitar is wireless(?) and therefore the hub isn't needed

Hang on. No PC version? WTF? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Great, i now have to slum it with Xbox Lag and analogue sticks

PS3 is the best value by a long way. Great PQ and it's fully upgradable, no other BD player makes sense right now. Also, 3 months pocket money?!?!?! You're 15 getting £100 a month?

Halo 3 is one of these games that i think actually deserves it's ratings. I'd still give it at least a 9 now, which is pretty good compared to most high scoring games. GTAIV being a perfect example, it's old after a month!

60% complete? Microsoft have a couple of big announcements coming at E3 for this Christmas. Then again the remaining 40% would need completing in 4 months or so, which probably isn't possible. The very idea makes me shiver in anticipation thought! I think it's just that we are a nice bunch of sensible, level headed people here in the Other Consoles board. Look at the Wii Board and you'll see what i mean ("Burn Ubisoft! They make no games i want to play! Im bored of the same old crap, i want what the 360 and PS3 have. But i will NEVAR admit it!!1!111!!!!")

It depends, i think the idea is that you dance around the living room like a prat. You can't do that with the headset, it falls off It's also really, really difficult to do the percussion sections (i end up blowing down the mic)

dunno why, but i read that geordie style. "what is camera and web browsing, like?" thought you were asking what a camera and a web browser were (it's been a long day!)