Posts by Daniel

Bout bloody time

they took a month to replace a brand new motherboard, the managers are rude and have a god complex. The tech support try and belittle you regardless of your experience. They deserve everything they get

Old

Isnt that hitatchi drive getting on a bit? I believe the samsung F1 Drives have much better performance? similar to that of a velociRaptor. for the same price you could RAID 0 two samsungs, it would be interesting to see how that affects things?

even better they could compare the velociraptor to a decent SSD?

The Future?

I don't know about you, but to me it seems as though we're going to evolve past needing legs at this rate.... the future for the human race?? well i picture an amorphous blob

supply and demand? WTF

The idea that lowering the duty will bosst demand and cause prices to rise is a bit daft. Although supply and demand is the way it all works, the demand for petrol doesnt seem to be lowering with the cost of petrol going up. This is generally because people need to get places, people need petrol in their cars and bikes to do so. The idea that lowering the cost will somehow increase demand seems flawed. Much like the congestion charge it assumes people drive around at 8-9am in the morning, just for fun.

It's the tinfoil hat brigade!

First of all can you call a web browser a service? surely its a product?

Either way thats not the point, as numerous have mentioned this is unlikely to be intentional as there is no way they could confirm that everything you post and everything you browse is yours to give them rights to. So that just renders the entire thing useless. Don't write off what may be a very good browser because somebody copied and pasted the thing into a BETA release.

Man, I can imagine the train of thought some of you must go through...

"What's that, there's a new bandwagon rolling through town? LET ME ON!!!!!"

Put the tinfoil hats down and climb down from your high horse...

I have the original

I'll admit ive had a PSP since they came out... and its been sat in a draw for ages... but luckily because of this it had old firmware... which means its easily hacked... and now i actually use the damn thing!!! NES games for the win :)

wonder if the new one is hackable?

It reminds me of a quote I found a while back...

"Going to war over religion is like fighting over who has the best imaginary friend"

Oh and as for grammar in the work place... This isn't a job application form, it's a comments section. Aslong as it is legible then I don't see why so many people have a problem.

... I once knew a guy called Xenu... He had a funny shaped head.

computers... base 16?

I always thought computers were base 8?

8 bits in a byte?

or is it base 2? (binary)

I'd hardly say hex is its number system?

maybe im just senile

After reading all the flaming...

May I be the first to say...

It's fake, man you're all so lame, I slept with your mom...

Oh wait... You mean this isn't break.com?

Its a stupid story and although i usually enjoy reading the sun (not much thinking involved) this is a step too far and they are clearly just jumping on the bandwagon!

like the death of the concorde, digital download is a step backwards

Now don't take this the wrong way, but digital downloads are a step backwards in my eyes. We're willing to sacrifice quality for convenience? that's just rediculous. Digital downloads has it's place but I don't think movies are a viable option. music works because even at crappy bitrates theyre only going to get played through earphones (generally). Compare that to a movie, people want to watch a movie on a nice big TV with cracking sound, not a portable media player. I have seen the difference between SD and HD and its a nice jump. I have played a blueray in my ps3 and its unbelievable, epecially at 1080p!

This argument about it not being a step up is rubbish. 720p is a nice step up, but lets face it, that isnt true HD, 1080p is amazing in comparison to standard definition. As for the internet progressing... the bloody iPlayer nearly brought down the UK infrastructure and you're considering HD... are you mad!!?!

minimum spec

Now i still remember when XP first came out, people had a little over 1ghz and 128mb of RAM... and it ran like crap at the time. Same's happening here, nahelem and the new generation of hardware will allow vista to run smoother.

200 ram smoother than XP on the same hardware, I would hazard a guess that 98 would run smoother than both. But As hardware moves on so will the OS' to take care of new demands and technology.

Now vista isnt the peak of perfection, but neither was XP when it first came out. SP2 is the sweet spot (havent looked at sp3 yet).

No doubt vista will be fine by SP2 but by then windows 7 may be out..

Having used both vista and XP vista has some nice touches, the interface is great and does look the part, the quick search is fantastic. The indexing service is annoying in a laptop but on a desktop its not so bad.

the difference...

Surely the majority of legit discs are stamped and the non legit are burnt (as a rule of thumb)

Or are we talking about sophisticated pirates who u actually have the professional tools to make stamped DVD's rather then buying blank discs and burning them?

I just got back from the cinema

The local cinema is the first Digital only cinema in europe. Picture quality is fantastic, the sound is awesome and I can imagine there's a lot more they could do with it... the problem is. Nobody uses the damn thing! I just watched indiana jones.... (Don't even get me started on that) and there were about 18 people there!

I dont mind adverts, I just turn up late. Adverts are in games, on TV etc... I agree cinemas are getting a little more expensive, but when its good quality I dont mind paying. I can recommend Vue cinemas to everyone, The seats are huge, plenty of room its all clean its great...

Theres the EVO screen which has been bags, sofas with ice boxes and huge leather chairs which are just awesome... If all cinemas were like this im sure they would win back some of the crowds.

I'm afraid advertising is only going to get worse as less and less people go as the cinemas will need to recoup their losses.

am i the only one who looked in boredom

there seems to be an openzone hot spot just to the left of the loch ness in a field....

what am i the only one who looked?

fantastic... but

I hope to go acer dont try and load it full of their software!

If they load the xp version with their software it will kill it. as for the linux version.. that looks awesome. Can't wait

what a load of bull

Al these people saying that if you cant figure it out in 20 mins then its design is flawed....

Its utter rubbish. tell me, when you learnt to drive... how long did it take?

When learning to use a PC... more than 20 minutes?

How about the first time you tried setting up a network...

What I'm getting at is that i work in retail and the line i end up having to repeat to people is:

"when you buy a car, do they teach you to drive it?"

You are not entitled to a refund of a product because you are incapable in using it. There's a reason that "techies" exist, and why people will set up a product for you at a cost.

Don't be stupid guys, i know most of you are intelligent and generally can handle most things, but just because you can't use something doesn't mean its faulty!

hmmm

this looks like the whole amd tricore thing...

Tech1: "bugger someone buggered up the bottom of the screen"

Tech2: "cut it off and sell it as a 'special' display with little use"

MD: "GENIUS!"

ok i realise its not quite that simple. but meh im bored.

@bob

may want to reinstall your flash plugin as it works fine on three of my machines?

@ ANdy rock flamers

I agree with andy rock here, big woop. the 500gb drive is the key in this story, the fact that the macbook pro can now support 1Tb is nice, but essentially just apple catching up to the rest of the market. As andy mentioned other laptops allow for this AND an optical drive.

Now i realise this is something new to mac, but to be fair, if you're gonna carry around a seperate optical drive... why not carry an external drive? ok, you cant raid it... but ffs, this is nothing new.

As for "videoing all day", 2 things... if you're "videoing all day" surely you're lugging around a camera...? now what the hell kinda difference is an optical drive gonna make. hell in that case how much difference is an external HDD gonna make... Unless You're not using a decent camera setup and you just wonder around with a handycam claiming that you're making "the next big thing".

Look you jumped on flaming andy and all he did was point out that apple ownership has some major flaws to quote a random online illustrator "I buy from apple because it makes me feel closer to steve jobs". Yes they make good hardware and its aesthetically pleasing... but at the end of the day, they do have design flaws. You are making yourself sound like a trumped up film student with too much money to waste.

*I am aware this may not be the case, however i figured If you're gonna flame someone for nothing more than pointing out that Macs aren't a gift from god (and by god i do not mean steve jobs allthough i can see where you get that idea).

victims of their own success

The reason PCW isn't like the apple store is it's size. If the apple stores where anywhere near as large with the same kind of footflow, then none of what makes the apple store great would be there? As for the £90 for tutorials etc... well you can get a techfriend from PCW, they will guide you through, they will remotley sort your problem if they can't guide you through. and that's 24/7. And these aren't PCW employees so they do actually know a thing or 2.

As for PCW staff not posting their names... HELLO IM A TECHNICIAN AT A PC WORLD STORE.

man i cringe everytime i say that. The company is rediculous. I still remembersome genius in charge of buying invested in thousands of "3D FUZION" graphics cards.. he/she chose old series cards and budget models at that. Problem with that is that before an upgrade most customers talk to the techies, the majority of who know what theyre on about. sadly we wouldnt recommend these cards ever... i think almost every single one went clearance... and still nobody bought them! in the end i think they were all recalled.

Most of you seem to miss the major factors... the staff in store are what is expected of a very large retail chain. there is training available, but to most people this is just a crappy job and not a means to better them selves.

The serious lack of knowledge comes from the buying department and the people who decide the prices. They are ultimately screwing pcworld... and ya know why? because they probably have enough money in the bank to set them up for a long time. I hope all of senior management get whats coming to them. but sadly they won't the duty managers (who are generally more ill informed than the staff and have the people skills of a rhino) will probably just get shifted around. The people who will suffer most are those who shouldn't

There have been previous comments about instore managers being useless.. Well you know all those horror stories of "I COULDNT GET A REFUND" and all that jazz?? well ya know why? because some duty manager has gone on a power trip. They remind me of those kids at school... the ones who paid no attention, have no future, so jump on the pcw/currys/dixons bandwagon and try to become a manager... and when they get there... POWER!!!! they turn into power mad "jocks". This is all they are. they go back to being the bullies at school, they seek retribution on absolutley everyone.

Give me a decent budget and a hedgefund and I'll fix PCWorld. Give me a job in buying and some access to the price list.

As for slander. Sod it I've had a good run

oh the puns

"Sadly after a lot of probing, he was found to be full of sh*t"

@liam

Me thinks it was sarcasm

Have I Lost the plot?

It seems we all get a little hung up on the wrong things here. Now to me an MP3 player is designed to do one thing... play MP3's?

Now surely if they got rid of this useless notion that everyone wants an MP3 player that can wipe your ass for you and get the morning paper, we would have some truly fantastic players out there? I currently use an Iriver Clix. As far as I am concerned, the interface is second to none, the sound quality is brilliant, and it's not too large. I bought this over 2 years ago. It does everything i want, however i am now tempted by others in the market, the problem is theyre all huge. i want a small light mp3 player to take to the gym, to listen to on my bike etc. When in hell am i going to sit and watch a bloody video on an MP3 player? I see Video as a limited market, not the mass market. Now correct me if im wrong as i may just be strange. But my mp3 player stays in my pocket on shuffle. The screen is useful to navigate and make playlists on the fly, but in no way would i ever want to sit and watch a movie on it. the ipod shuffle is by far the best gadget, however if another manufacturer were to take lead from this, make it a little larger, add a screen, an easy navigation and keep it slim then it would sell in mass.

My phone is a nokia 6500 classic, its slim its nice looking, it doesnt neccesarily do much, it has 3G (WHY!?!?!) it seems this phone could be smaller if not for the pointless gadgets. I see there is a market, but the camera on my phone takes snaps and they generally are rarely shown to people and when i change phone i delete them. wuality is not good enough to print and not good enough to put on screen, so why bother?

Apply this logic to MP3 players, sod video, sod games, sod everything, jus have an MP3 player with brilliant sound quality and a good interface, make it slim make it light. Has anyone noticed these things generally aren't getting much smaller? i used to have a mobiBlue cube mp3 player. fantastic little thing. problem is its shape and sound quality. Flatten it out a bit, bigger screen for easier navigation and a capacity of atleast 4gb and its perfect!

rant over... carry on

£10m

Am i the only one who thinks that £10m is steep? surely raw components and labour, and anything else factored in don't quite add up to anywhere near £10m. It's like insurance repair jobs, quote whatever the hell you want 'cos you know they'll pay it!

Hmm

Now i may have a slightly narrow mind on this subject, but surely the BBC have to have some responsibility in this? If you create a product that causes damage to other systems... in this case clogging up every ISP's bandwidth. Then you should have atleast some of the responsibility in fixing the issue? I'm trying desperately here to think of an analagy, but its a pretty unique sitiuation..

Either way the moral is "you F**ked it, you fix it"

Hell if we're going to go on a rant, maybe the government should step in and put some money towards making the UK a bit more technologically advanced.

my 2 pence

It makes a change to see this much response to a subject, but not that suprising, every fan boy comes out of the woodwork for a subject like this.

I own a Wii for one reason. It's fun to play and you can have a laugh with your mates. This is the sole reason that I do not own a ps3 or Xbox. Anyone can pick up a wii controller and get to grips with it quickly. I still have mates that pick up a ps3/xbox controller and turn it whilst trying to go around a corner.

If i want a nice FPS, i will play it on PC, the way it was designed to be played. If i want to play an RTS, i will play it on PC as it was designed to be played, ON PC!

The wii is great for a laugh with your mates, Zelda kept me amused for ages and i have no clue why people are ranting on about the control system? Mario kart is fantastic and the online play is a nice touch.

What im getting at is that FPS and RTS are much better played on a PC, generally everything is much better on a PC, racing games NEED a steering wheel, flight games NEED a joystick but they are more customisable and generally better on PC.

What we need is less crappy console ports, less waiting for a PC release and more decent games for PC.

The wii is perfect at what it does, its small, its cheap it gets everyone playing and not just your average gamer and it takes gameplay to a new level. Who cares about graphics, when the gameplay is that involving you dont notice!

Of course people have been "mistreated"

Surely most people will say they have been mistreated, imagine, you get caught uploading a movie and your cut off from your internet service for doing so. The majority of people who get caught for this blame the ISP because they are too stupid to take precautions.

If you go over your overdraft limit and the bank charges you... well thats unfair isn't it?

Britain is a nation of moaners, we know that, but it doesn't mean we've been screwed out of 6.6Bn!

Why?

I don't quite understand the logic behind mobile music. now i like the idea of having a phone that can play MP3's, pretty much all of the phones i've had could play MP3's. yet for some reason i've never really used one for playing MP3's, you knwo why? generally the music players have a crap interface and i don't happen to own a headset that uses a crappy proprietry connector and sounds good, i refuse to carry around an adapter just to listen to music. not to mention that the majority of phones are huge, so if i want to go to the gym, i can't exactly strap it to me. the whole digital music bollocks is hopefully going to fade out. I still want a CD, what i would recommend to the record companies is offer a trial of a song. I hate buying a CD and knowing that the majority of songs are goign to be crap, so i download them first, if i like it, i buy it. I will rip the songs to whatever quality I choose and that's how it should be. The more i listen to music and the better my audio equipment gets, the more i realise the difference compression makes, and i'll be honest, i wish i could go back. being able to hear the difference to clearly makes you miss CD's.

Anyway random rant over. digital media to me seems like a daft idea, and making it mobile seems even worse. Now if you could pay a subscription and be allowed to stream the tracks you want.. that would be a great idea, aslong as you're not charged for the data

@ Andy vernel

Have you ever sold anything on ebay? oh what a joyous experience, 6 attempts to sell my mobile phone due to scammers, the money came through, i was dubious so waited a day, and sure as hell the payment disappears, now if i had send the item paypal would have done nothing to protect me. And if it isnt the scammers, paypal will scam you, google "paypal nightmares" and enjoy the reading. they willingly hold your money, a buyer can pay for something when it turns up, one email to paypal and the money is stolen... YES STOLEN from the sellers account, afterall a buyer wouldn't lie would they?

buyer support is generally fine, its the sellers that get ass raped

"Learn From Apple"

Your kidding right? you want the staff to know everything about everything they sell? well bare in mind that apple don't sell any where near as many products as dsg stores? you want them to know the response rate on a monitor? have you seen the generic crap they sell, i doubt they even list the response time in the manufacturers specification!

I don't condone everything that dsg do, infact im usually the first to slate them, sadly i work for them and often find myself sending people to maplins for parts we are rediculously priced on or that we simply don't stock because our guy in charge of purchasing for dsg stores has all the intelligence of a trout.

Poor idea

Imagine you go to answer your call and hit the wrong button... surely a high voltage shock to the head isnt a good idea???

Laptops

I believe i've killed atleast 5 laptops doing this now, tried to wake from standby using the touchpad and ZAP! never worked again.

Nice idea

I have to admit, thats a huge amount of bandwidth, but what devices will actually support it?

and i have to say i wish we would pick a standard and stick with it. for gods sake firewire always seems to perform better and has more potential... so why bother with usb?!

bunch of synical F****rs

Right i am a windows user, always have been and always will be, i've dabbled in linux, but have no real benefits from it. I have a big desktop and a little laptop.

the desktop does the grunt work and gaming. the laptop does wireless internet, business and gets moved around every single day to a new location. All i have plugged in recently would be a webcam, and a thumb drive. but not at the same time. The last disc i put in the machine was to install....well you know what i think it was to install the OS.

anyway a 12.1" screen is pretty small and it makes for a tidy laptop but it can be a bit cramped and strains your eyes. but what can you do? most 13" screens result in fatter laptops? The apple is slim, infact possibly one of the slimmest. it may be very similar to other laptops at its thickest point but it is ludicrously thin at the edges due to its shape. it has no cd drive, no problem there, my music is mp3 and most drivers etc i download. yes it has one usb, but as i said its usually just a pen drive i plug in anyway.

and the price starts at £1199... the extra grunt is a waste of money because the whole point is that it isnt designed to be powerful, its designed to be portable and simple. Yes the SSD is expensive but your paying for a slightly better processor aswell, afterall if your interested in an SSD money isnt that much of an issue.

Just relax, go play with your little ee and let me know what you do when a webpage isnt 800pixels wide? annoying having to scroll sideways isnt it.

death penalty

well working on that basis they should have the death penalty as a punishment for open shut cases, I.E the ones where they find the murder weapon, dna evidence and a picture to prove it.

anything with doubts shouldnt be sentenced. it would sure help the crowded prisons

@insane

surely the total number of sales is not an accurate measurement either? we've established that the 360 crowd is more "hardcore" and therefore i would expect them to buy more games.

ANyway your all wrong, PC for games, wii for fun.

if you want realism, play on your pc against your mates, talking on teamspeak and playing on the one true platform.

If you want to get hammered with your mates and have a laugh, you break out the wii.

and for this whole next gen argument... did they have decent motion sensors on the previous generation??? NO so this is a new generation, graphics aren't everything my friend, why do you think people play these rediculous online flash games for hours and hours on end!?!

non profit

i thought you could only claim damages if the company was making money using your design? if its non profit, how is it in anyway affecting sales or business of the original patent holder?

either way its pretty disgusting although i love the fact theyve taken a jab at the guy for his stint in prison. way to go el reg! its nice to have a non biased report! not that i blame you

WTF

I bought one in january, walked into a shop, paid my money and left. i have seen them in stock throughout the year... why the hell did noone think to buy early?

Theres been talk of shortages in laptop supplies which affects the wii directly, so why oh why are people coming out with this crap about it being intentional. Nintendo could sell anything they produce right now, so why would they restrict stock? yes demand would increase but sales would decrease. after christmas things will invitably die down again.

as for the comment about waiting a few years... why? i just dont understand that logic. old consoles don't generally get any new games except for cross platform games such as sports games. i wouldnt justify spending £500 on a wii, but i also wouldnt wait 2-3 years

superior... yes SUPERIOR

I would consider Blu-ray superior... after all why jump up to a newer standard because it is cheaper to make? blu-ray is taking a risk, its more expensive but the capacities are larger. If technology only progressed because it was cheaper than others then we'd hardly move. end of the day its capable of holding more data and that to me makes it superior... albeit a little buggy