Quote from Jakg :

If your doing anything professionally i'd go for a better quality 22" monitor, as the 24" i picked isn't the best on the market (but for £200 it is an AMAZING buy!)

If it were me, and i played more than just LFS, i'd go for the E2180. If i could afford the extra, and loved my CPU power then id get the E4500.

IMO the price difference isn't really worth it, though.

You have everything you need, however i'd REALLY recommend spending a few extra £ on a decent case like this one - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135101. It's £42, yet it comes with a free PSU thats actually decent. It's nowhere near as good as the one you chose, and will probably not support any faster GFX card, but you save £18 and get a better case.

If youw ant more RAM for cheap, then this - http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpe ... 2x1GB%29+?productId=27220 - might be good. It's only PC-5300 rather than 6400, though, but £23.44 for 2 GB isn't bad, and you might even wanna get 4 GB, which comes to £46.88, however if you spend £50 you get £5 off if you buy via Google Checkout. It's up to you.

EDIT - Yes you CAN get free P&P from Scan, lemme get a link...

You can collect it from their warehouse near leeds, or if you want it delivered then try this.

Cheers Jakg thats the sort of stuff I needed to know

I think I'll stick with the 24" Acer you suggested because it seems like a great buy and also the fact I could be done with the bigger desktop.

I had thought about the case but having read the reviews people had left it doesn't seem to be all bad. Changed it for this one (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/119590). My line of thought is to spend more on a PSU which will hopefully let me off with upgrading in the future. If the case turns out to be pants I'll replace it sometime down the line when I've got a bit more cash.

I'll have to think about the memory deal, quite tempting to go for 4gbs.

Cheers again Jakg, you've been very helpful Hopefully order all the bits today!

Cheers for the advice guys! Updated the spec now in attachment. Do Scan do any sort of free p&p option like eBuyer?

Changed the mobo and gfx card, kept the E4500 as I felt it might be worth spending a lil extra now than regretting it later down the line. The difference spec wise between a E2180 and a E4500 doesn't seem much to me (200mhz & 1mb extra cache) but I'm guessing it all makes a difference .

Think I'll splash out and go for the 24" Acer, got a £120 from my Dad to put towards a decentish monitor. Considering I'm hoping to be studying Visual Communication/Graphic Comm next year I'd best be prepared

Keiran

Looking at prices the cheapest E6xxx seems to be about £115, which is a bit too much over what I want to spend at the moment.

No plans to overclock but I might read up on the ins and outs of overclocking and experiment later down the lines

Thanks Jakg. Updated attachement with 600w power supply and different memory as for some reason the memory shot up £10 in price...

Anyone got any other suggestions or is that probably the best I'm going to get for my money?

Cheers
Keiran

I don't understand peoples problems at the start of races. 9 times out of 10 I can work my way through the field with minimal contact yet you'll always get the loud mouthed ones shouting off the in the server about getting `wrecked.` Then when I've spec'd to watch them 9 times out of 10 it's there fault they are getting caught up.

I'll start from back/mid-field/front and have very few problems.

Rules of race starts
1. Don't jam your brakes on for no reason... if your unsure where to brake then brake gently
2. Always know where the other cars are around you by using left/right and behind views
3. Don't hesitate, keep your line if you can and don't start diving for silly gaps
4. Cars spinning ahead = slow down NOT pile into them full throttle
5. Hold the inside line, that way you make people go the long way round and wont find yourself getting forced out wide at T1...

Those are the steps I take and I very rarely find myself involved in any contact at T1...

At the end of the day `shit happens` if you get knocked at the start of the race just continue driving. I hate the ones who spend the whole race doing `shift + r` when if they had just kept going they'd have only lost about 5secs.

What sort of power of a power supply should I be looking at? Also what brands should I trust/avoid.

Keiran

Working at Kartstart as a track marshal.

Although a student the rest of the time

Thanks for the suggestions guys. Looking into the templating but need to get my head around them, smarty confused the hell out of me!

Deffo looking into caching the product pages

Quote from sgt.flippy :

And it states the driver of the Range Rover was drunk and under influence. So I wouldn't even attack the parents at that. For all there is known at this moment, the kid could have been driving safely and correct on the road.

First of all the kid shouldn't be on any public road driving a quad, it's illegal as a) she isn't old enough b) has no license c) has no insurance.

We've had a few toys, quads etc and never would my parents let us roam free on them. We'd go in a empty field and use them. For parents to let their kid take the quad onto a public road is just insase .

To let a kid use a quad unsupervised again is just stupid, even if they were using it correctly if they did have an accident who would help them? A 7 year old isn't going to life a quad off themselves.

It's as bad as the parents who know their kids are roaming about the streets on mini motos... and just let them do it.

Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 2.20GHz ... he Retail Boxed Processor £74.93
Asus 8800GT 512MB GDDR3 Dual DVI HDTVOut PCI-E Graphics Card £169.99
ASUS P5K AiLifestyle Series iP ... nel Audio ATX Motherboard £68.58
Corsair 2GB Kit (2x1GB) DDR2 8 ... preader Lifetime Warranty £46.56
Western Digital WD3200AAKS 320 ... 16MB Cache 7200 RPM - OEM £49.99
LG GSA-H55NBAL 20x DVD±RW/DL/RAM IDE Black Bare Drive - OEM £16.67
OCZ StealthXtream 500W PSU £43.99
Casecom KB-5510 Black/Silver B ... D Mid Tower Case - No PSU £9.99
CIBOX C2201 22'' Widescreen TF ... speakers 3 Years Warranty £150.05
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium x64Bit OEM 1PK DVD £61.61

Total
£692.46

Updated with suggested Mobo and graphics card. £91 more which I can probably stretch to (pay day today!!! ). Any other suggestions/advice? Have I got everything there that I need, will only be using my speakers, mouse & keyboard from current machine.

Also is the 64bit version of Vista okay? I remember reading a lot about driver problems a while back...

Cheers
Keiran

Quote from FastGuy21 :

no its just my perents wont let me get a licence they dont like puttin credit card info on the internet :'(,

As many demo users are being told you're playing a FREE demostration. Doesn't matter what your situation is that you can't buy the game, that's life. Plenty of things I'd like to have in this world but I can't buy them for whatever reason.

So to all demo users, stop effing whining and enjoy the very generous demo you've. How many demos give you unlimited play and free updates?

Quote from geeman1 :

Actually buying with a credit card over the Internet is really safe, you can easily get your money back just by contacting the credit card company if you are scammed. No idea how you could convince your parents though.

Exactly, can't understand why people are scared of the net.

You have more rights buying something over the internet than you do in a shop. When you purchase an item in the shop the sales person is left with a recipt that has all the card details they need, bar the 3 digit code on the back to go on a spending spree.

Hey all,

Working on a new website for my Mum's shop (http://designsonpine.co.uk). Re-coding the way some of it works, especially the page layouts. The website is PHP + MySQL driven.

As you can see in the attached image there is a row of images and then the product info.

The way my old code worked was take everything out of the database and store it in arrays i.e:

Itemcode[a]
Image_ID[a]
etc

Then I'd loop through it and populate the first <tr> with the images and work my way down with item codes etc. Doing it this way I ended up with loads of whiles and ifs.

This seems a very clumber some way to do it and was wandering whether anyone had any other suggestions that I'm just not seeing.

As I'm making some major changes just wanted to see if anyone had any suggestions before I started getting my head around my current mess

Keiran

Quote from srdsprinter :

Looks pretty good, but I *think that might be a bit high price for the 8600gt. The 8800gt 256mb would be worlds better if you could go that route. I mean litereally like 2-4 times as powerfull as that 8600.

RAM -> You should look for some DDR2-800 which is PC2-6400. Jakg might recommend some RAM for you, but that looks good.

Your Mobo should be fine for SATA 2/3.

Are you planning to OC? If so you should be able to hit 3.0+ GHz very easily and safely.

Not really planning on overclocking, don't know a huge amount about it. Don't want to do a Harjun

Quote from Jakg :

P5B's are INSANELY overpriced on eBuyer. Spend the extra £11 on an Asus P5K.

If you give me a budget, and say if you will or wont be overclocking, if you need RAID etc i'll see what i can russle up.

Around the £650 mark (inc. the monitor), can go a bit over if needed. I doubt I'll be overclocking it and I don't think I'll need RAID.

Cheers guys!

Keiran

My turn to seek knowledge from the ones who know

After working a heck of a lot of overtime during the xmas period I feel I can afford to splash out a bit on building myself a new comp. My current one is starting to feel its age, stuck in the AMD socket A days and just can't quite keep a steady frame rate in LFS.

I attach/link to the items I've picked out but to be quite frank I'm totally out of touch these days. I'm on a budget but willing to spend a little extra if there is a decent performance gain to be had of it.

Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 2.20GHz ... he Retail Boxed Processor £74.93
EVGA 8600GT Superclocked 256MB ... V out PCI-E Graphics Card £89.89
Asus P5B Socket Lga775 Core 2 ... 00 Gigabit Lan 8chn Audio £57.97
Corsair 2GB Kit (2x1GB) DDR2 8 ... preader Lifetime Warranty £46.56
Western Digital WD3200AAKS 320 ... 16MB Cache 7200 RPM - OEM £49.99
LG GSA-H55NBAL 20x DVD±RW/DL/RAM IDE Black Bare Drive - OEM £16.67
OCZ StealthXtream 500W PSU £43.99
Casecom KB-5510 Black/Silver B ... D Mid Tower Case - No PSU £9.99
CIBOX C2201 22'' Widescreen TF ... speakers 3 Years Warranty £150.05
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium x64Bit OEM 1PK DVD £61.61

Total
£601.65

Doesn't have to be from eBuyer, just used them to make it easier.

The things I'm not sure about are the RAM and HDD. On the RAM I was a bit confused on the specs i.e 4200, 6400 (wasn't sure which was better). The HDD is more a case of wording, looking at the motherboard it doesn't say anything about SATA 2 which had me slightly concerned.

Any help/advice what so ever would be greatly appreciate

Keiran

Last edited by keiran, Wed 26 Dec 2007, 02:06.

Thought I'd post here rather than start a new thread

Got a 19" widescreen monitor for xmas, going to exchange/get refund for a bigger monitor. Was looking at exchanging it (+ adding an extra £80 for a 22" Acer) from Argos.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/130842

Decided to see what eBuyer were offering and they have a 24" Acer for £205 (only £5 more than the 22" at Argos). Now the only difference I see are the contrast ratio of 800:1 and 6ms response time. The 22" has a ratio of 1000:1 and 5ms response.

Anyone got any opinions or advice? Don't know a huge amount about what to look for in a monitor. I do a lot of graphic work so could be done with the extra work space. It also needs to be able to play LFS.

edit//

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/128036

Now also considering the monitor above, has some good reviews. Reason for considering the 22" above is I'm hoping to finally put together a new computer so the extra £50 would come in handy there.

Any thoughts on the 22" also?

Thanks
Keiran

Last edited by keiran, Wed 26 Dec 2007, 00:49.

Don't we get a unlock every Friday? So you've managed to use all your unlocks up in two days...

Quote from danowat :

You could try ebay

Tried, can't find any

Quote from Scrabby :

well IF u have one, walk into your local hobby shop and they'll probably have a solution for it , is the nosecone also damaged?

Kind of have a local hobby shop but it's pretty pathetic. Might pop in but don't really like spending money there as they don't support our club which races about 200yds from them. Don't stock anything we need for our r/c cars...

Nose cone is alright, the plane is one of these `crash proof` things. Although the propellers don't take much of a beating. On the back of the manual it says `Check if propeller is damaged or not. If yes, replace it with a new one.`

So here’s hoping that means they do sell spares.

Keiran

Probably a strange question for this forum but I have no idea where else to try. One of my gifts this xmas was a Tech art sky 3 radio control airplane (http://www.maplin.co.uk/module ... leNo=221451&doy=25m12).

Unfortunately on the first charge we managed to break the propeller. I glued it back together with some strong CA glue I use for my r/c racing. It held well but another rough landing caused it to break further down the propeller and now I'm missing a bit of plastic.

My question is does anyone know where/if you can get spares for them? Sent an e-mail to the people who make it but just wanted to see if anyone here knew...

Cheers
Keiran

In need of some help choosing a laptop for my Mum. Basically she spilt coffee over her old one (about 5 years old) so has claimed off the insurance. Her previous laptop was a top of the range Sony Vaio in its time so the insurance are giving her about £1000 in a voucher.

This voucher can be used at:
http://www.currys.co.uk
http://www.pcworld.co.uk
http://www.dixons.co.uk
(not our preferred choices either...)

The laptop is mainly a works laptop where illustrator and photoshop are used quite a lot so needs to be able to cope with that.

What can around £1000 buy laptop wise? What brands should I look at?

Cheers
Keiran

Quote from Jertje :

Not to sound rude or anything... but don't you people catch your falls with your arms, legs, shoulders, etc? ;p

I've fallen hundreds of times in my life, but I've never hit my head in the process. Had my elbows cut open though, and my knees, and my hands.

Was just the way I went down. The barriers are fairly high so when your in a rush the easiest way is to jump onto the top of the barrier and then jump off again.

Unfortuantley someone left a broken barrier in front of the barriers marking the circuit so when I jumped onto it (traveling a fair speed) it went straight under my feet. Then the barriers marking the circuit turned me into a sea-saw (just without the saw :schwitz.

The only reason I've come up with for not getting my arms down in time was a) the speed I went over the barriers b) the barriers getting in the way of my arms...

Just a few weeks ago I split my chin open after going head over heals over the top of one of the barriers that marks the track at work. Was quite a deep cut (landed with all my weight on my chin, hands weren't even grazed!) and needed 3 stitches. Nothing scarier than trying to clamber to your feet winded with a 8 year old heading straight for ya in a kart .

Doctor that saw me at A&E was telling the student that was with him that as it was quite a deep cut it would need stitches... I guess they just make it up as they go along

Keiran

So what makes you think that you could catch/control oversteer if you couldn't feel/control the understeer early enough to avoid an accident?

My Clio understeers quite badly in the wet so I know not to push the front too hard coming into corners.

Having a cars balance set more towards oversteer would be stupid IMO. Would make accidents a lot more violent, at least if you skid off the road head on into a tree there is a lot more to crumple and protect the passengers. Head off the road side ways there isn't much to crumple before you become part of the car.

Understeer is a lot more controllable IMO and especially for people who are novices when it comes to car control.

edit/ Bah Tristan beat me to it

Does LFS not have a feature built into the dedi to stop this? I'm 99% sure I remember the introduction of such a thing to stop restarts during the race... Could be wrong though

Quote from harjun :

you know i didn't laugh at that if you were trying to be funny....

just tell me yes or no...forget all other stuff like petrol etc. will i be able to buy a competitive kart for £1000...

Read the posts and you'll find your answer.

You just keep ignoring everyone hoping to hear what you want, rather than accept the facts. You started off at £400, now suddenly you've found a £1000. You’re going to need probably at least £2000 to get started and that’s assuming you can find a way of transporting it.

That’s still no where near a competitive budget though, a club budget at best.

Quote from harjun :

i think i will buy a nice cheap £200 125CC Rotax engine, as my uncle has a chassis

In your dreams... £200 will get you a cheap engine rebuild

Thats right Harjun, ignore all the facts put in front of you. So I'll ask the question again, what happened to your karting career that existed a little over 20 days ago?