Info and forum posts by 'blinky2004'

RE: Aldi bargains from 1st July - DVD+/- writer £60, 160GB hard drive £70, digicam £90...

Won`t be any different to any other you have fitted. Just set the slave/master/cable select jumper and possibly limit the block size if your motherboard cannot handle a drive which is that big. Screw in place and plug in the leads.

The pictures which are shown are just for publicity purposes. All hard drive mechanical bits are sealed in a clean room during manufacture.

Bare drive means you don`t get any instructions, IDE cables or overlay software (used if your BIOS cannot handle a disk of that size).

If the drives are 7200rpm 8mb cache then I`d be tempted. Slowly stockpiling bits for a new work machine. Pity they aren`t SATA though

RE: Alternative to Wanadoo 17.99 Broadband!

The light service has a limit of 1Gb/month (as with many others - let`s face it, ISP`s are tied by the BT wholesale tarrifs).

Wireless broadband has been tried before but there were problems. You need to be within line of sight with the transmitter / receiver for it to work.

www.adslguide.org.uk is probably the best source of broadband info for the UK.

This item was edited on Sunday, 27th June 2004, 20:09

RE: Verbatim 25 discs 4xDVD-R £14.99

Just checked the dye type from the media code
Media code/Manufacturer ID MCC 01RG20

Ritek dye quality seems to be increasingly variable (see forums over at CD Freaks if you don`t believe me). The quality of G04 discs seems very variable. Also very few manufacturers have enabled their drives to burn Ritek G05 (-R) and Ritek R03 (+R) at the 8x speed which Ritek claims for these disks (NEC actually removed the 8x capability for G05 from the 2500 1.07 firmware). In fact Ritek are apparently researching on G06 to replace G05.

Mitsubishi (Verbatim`s parent company) discs are known to be one of the leaders (Tayo Yuden are the best). These discs will burn at 8x with very low PI and PO errors. G04`s don`t always burn reliably at 4x never mind any higher.

Would you rather use cheap media or reliable media?

In comparison for the same product Aria charges £31+p&p, Dabs £19+P&P and while SVP don`t sell the spindles but the printable Verbatims (in jewel cases) are around 80p now.

I generally use Bulkpaq Printable +R 8x discs which give very low error rates. These cost me around £12-13 at a local computer fair for £25 but then I have to add on the admission fee = £2-3. I believe SVP sell these for a similar price but then I have to add on postage and have to wait for the postman.

Therefore, I think the actual offer is good value for a true top quality DVD-R.

Verbatim 25 discs 4xDVD-R £14.99

Not listed on their website but The Computer Shop (formerly Time / Tiny) are doing spindles of 25 Verbatim 4x DVD-R for £14.99.

Haven`t tried any yet so I not sure which dye these have (should be MMC but could be CMC). However, Verbatim discs are usually very good quality.

RE: Game bargains at WHSmith

Metrocentre branch (pity about the chava`s :D )

Rainbow 6 Three: Raven Shield in Limited Edition Soft Case £4.99
Republic : The Revolution £9.99

+ others already mentioned

RE: Family Guy Season 3 (3 disc boxset) for a tenner.

Thanks for the heads up - also bought all 3. Looking forward to them arriving.

RE: Taken plunge with Broadband - I think it is a good deal?

Pipex £19.95+VAT per month (= 23.44 I think)

Fast, reliable and no bandwidth caps :) They`ve always said that they have no intentions of imposing any caps.

www.adslguide.org.uk is the best source of broadband info. Message boards are very useful

RE: Family Guy Season 1 Cheap

Only had one left when I went in the Metrocentre branch last night :(

However, I did pick up Spiderman 2DVD Special Edition for £5.99 reduced from £24.99 :)
It was the last one though

RE: Advice sought from you boffins out there concerning new business, start up website.

1) Best to use the .co.uk and for the site to actually be hosted in the UK. Most of the UK search engines do some filtering to boost either sites with .co.uk (actually .uk) or by IP address or occasionally both.

2) Never used them. There are plenty of alternative hosts out there at reasonable rates.

3) Difficult to say. Depends on how you are expecting people to find out about your business. If you are relying on web traffic via search engines it depends on:
i) how well the site is written and it should incorporate relevant keyphrases you want to be found for and which people are actually searching for.
ii) how well the site is designed.
iii) How much money and time you are prepared to attracting quality traffic.
Getting good positions in search engines and quality traffic to a site is more involved than simply submitting the pages..... (It`s my job).

The other factor to consider is by getting exposure and traffic to your website it is more likely that your boss will hear about it - which would make you self employed more quickly!

This item was edited on Thursday, 26th February 2004, 00:18

RE: Panasonic DVD-S75 (£99)

My Aiwa AX-10 plays everything I`ve thrown at it, including DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, VCD, SVCD and MP3 datadiscs. It`s a rebadged Sony but cheaper. Only slight downside is you need a universal remote / PDA / laptop with IR port to region free it.

Although it`s not listed as doing progressive scan some of the MPEGs I`ve encoded for burning have been set at progressive scan and they playback fine.

RE: Pipex connection

There have been problems for people on the xtreme server. I haven`t been affected as I`m on xtreme2. As the others say the Pipex forum at ADSL guide is your best bet. It`s not uncommon for the technical director to post their from time to time.

RE: 8x NEC2500a DVD burner wont go faster than 2.4x with 4x media

Might have to wait for a firmware update. What`s the media code (use DVDInfoPro).
I know Datasafe 8x +R (Ritek R03) only burns at 4x with the current firmware but NEC are aware of this isssue and it will be resolved in the next firmware update.

Verbatim Datalife Plus (MMC) 4x and Taito Yuden dye x4 -R discs burn at 8x in this drive.

www.cdfreaks.com have a NEC forum

RE: Canon digi cam

Under low lighting I find the 405 is suspectible to noise except when using the zoom for close-ups.

I believe the A60 is better for this and it has a helper light for autofocusing in dark conditions.

RE: Cheap Dell, complete PC package!!!

Would touch a P4 Celeron with a bargepole....

The P4 core is dependent on memory and cache bandwidth. The original P4 core (willamette) was crippled with only 256Kb L2 cache. P4`s only started giving good performance when the Northwood Core with 512Kb L2 cache came out.

The P4 Celeron`s only have 128Kb L2 cache :o

When the 2.0GHz Celeron came out Tom`s Hardware benchmarked it and even when it was overclocked to 3.0GHz it was regularly trounced in the tests by an AMD XP1800+ - not good.

(I`m not anti Intel - I`m using a P4 2.4B@ 2.93 at the moment).

128Mb -> 256Mb RAM worth £40 - I think not. 256Mb DDR costs between £20 and £30.
128Mb is around £12.

Also remember that XP really wants a minimum of 256Mb for itself, so for heavy apps you`d be wanting 384-512Mb

Never been a fan of onboard graphics - slows your system down. a) it steals RAM from the system. b) when it is the graphics is accessing the RAM it is restricting access for the other system components.

They haven`t even supplied a CD writer. To a consumer the difference is only a few quid so to Dell the cost would be next to nothing. Probably shifting old stock.

Not such a good deal really, then is it. A local computer store could probably do something better for the same price. (Okay you get Dell support but Watchdog said it was terrible last week, as is their delivery).

RE: Saving Private Ryan - Woolworths £3.99

Damm paid £4.99 at HMW ;)

RE: Hack needed for Aiwa XD-AX10

yes if you have a programmable remote or a laptop / Palm with IR

see www.dvdrhelp.com