Since you are immoral enough to find the Peter File gag funny I say buy, buy, buy. You are already going to hell so you may as well mug some Granny’s whilst you are at it 😛

Hi Chris,

I’d definitely agree with everything Cougar says here, sounds like they may be having you on. If they are any good they would probably be happy for you to take your PC in to look at it with them – if the card is fine then you have other issues which they could help you fix and make more £.

Just checking here and power requirements are pretty similar for the HD 5850 as the R9 270X and both need 2 x 6 pin plugs so if your old card is working I think it is safe to say it is either the new card or something odd with your motherboard. If you have a second PCI-e x16 slot have you tried the card in that?

Radeon HD 5850 vs Radeon R9 270

BEB

Mobo or the card then. What was your last card?

Test with a VGA cable instead or HDMI or DVI.

Also see if you can test with a different PSU. The R9-270X will pull a fair amount of power (when gaming) and if your PSU is knackered weird problems with graphics cards are not unheard of.

Also definitely try a clean driver install.

I think noticing any difference would depend on the tyre compounds and size.

For a cheap 10 year old fun car a well looked after MG ZS 180 could be worth a look and should be in budget. An MG TF would be a lot of cheap fun as well but you would need to be sure the head gasket and other usual gremlins have been sorted especially since you’d need to rely on it to get to work!

I had a 2003 Mini Cooper S which was great did 90,000 in it with no problems – just new tyres and brakes etc.

I now drive a 407 1.6HDI remapped which isn’t bad but a bit boring… I’m thinking about swapping it for one of the coupe’s with a V6.

My dad’s got a triton that needs rebuilding

My dad’s got one of those and a BSA Goldstar, my bother’s welcome to the Triton 😀

Some of those bikes aren’t what I think of when cafe racers are mentioned, and some are definitely out & out sprint bikes

NSA[/url] (the other NSA)

Wearing hats is cool, but wearing hats in doors is just plain wrong.

I have never heard of or received interview expenses. I’ve also conducted plenty of interviews and never once been asked about expenses; do I live on some other planet or is it that all my work & interview experience have been private sector?

Whilst flicking through the Gerbers on Amazon I found this. Probably been done before but some of the product reviews are ace!

Wenger Swiss Army Knife

She thought Barnes and Elias were the same person. Sort of defeats the point of the film.

I remember writing an essay along those lines as part of one of the ‘arty’ modules I took at university – I haven’t seen Platoon since then but I seem to remember part of premise was they represented inner turmoil, or mortality, or some bollocks like that.

Mrs BEB used to have a 2003 Cooper S, and went through great lengths to get a pushchair that would fit in the boot.

She ended up selling it as rear seats were too awkward to fit a proper kids seat in once the eldest out grew the baby carrier.

If the system detects wrong information during loading, the respective document that contains the error will be rejected and won’t be entered into the database.

Windows 7?

I am sure I have something in PowerShell to pull what I needed from txt log files. From what I remember it was a lot easier if regular expressions were involved though…

Pffftt…

that’s not a real plane, theres no propellers 🙂

I doubt it will even get through the endless rounds of congress to get any budget approved – which is probably why something like it might already exist in some form and is being kept under wraps…

I’ll let you know when I get back from Area 51 – if the MiB don’t catch me.

I could be wrong but I believe most countries on the continent ban the use of air-rifles for hunting – even small vermin. That was certainly the case in Spain. I think that the permited power levels may also be lower.

Taking it in/out of the UK shouldn’t be a problem, there should be a guide on the airline/ferry/tunnel website and I think you probably have to declare it, but having it chrono’ed by a reputable gunsmith and having that doc/report with you should help ensure that on entry no one questions its power and asks to see your FAC for it.

Go and do a search on the airgunBBS, someone will have asked this there.

You may just wish to buy a cheap plinker in France…

edit: beaten to it 🙂

The Muslasmic Ray Guns thing always made me laugh; then I found out he was trying to say Islamic Rape gangs – if someone more with it said that there are a few areas were they could really stir up trouble before anyone actually bothered to investigate… oh, they did…

I actually wonder if this is just the first steps in preparation for trying to get into politics proper. The EDL isn’t a political party but if they had a party that represented their raison d’être then I’m sure it would do better than the BNP.

Of course we all know proper political parties espouse peace etc. even when they have close ties with thugs and murderers.

Along with materials science the allies were well ahead in petro- chemical’s science in WW2. It’s one of the reasons the engines could be simpler in design – better quality and higher octane fuels were available.

For me the best (ugliest) bit of cold war British engineering has to be the Lightning. Watching one as a kid at an air show was awesome.

You could also argue that Concord was every bit a symbol of cold war engineering and far more useful than the hydrogen bomb.

I just got one of these for £50 and plugged it in to my router to replace my noisy PS3;

Netfix and Iplayer work well and a HDD plugged into the USB port means I can watch MP4’s etc.

Sony S1100 Blu Ray

Those q6600 were awesome chips. I went from a stock one of those at 2.4ghz to an AMD FX 8120 and as far as I can tell the AMD is only faster for gaming due to higher clock speeds and ddr3 ram.

Mine paired well with a radeon 6850 so an overclocked one should still give decent performance on todays cards if you can get it high enough.

The FX-6300 is well suited to gaming without breaking the bank. It’s true that AMD CPUs’ need either more cores or higher clock speeds to compete with the faster intel chips and generally run hotter; but since they are usually cheaper and most games rely more heavily on the graphics card these days why worry?

Have a hunt around though, you might be able to get an older Intel i5 Sandy-bridge or Ivy-Bridge CPU /Mobo bundle a bit cheaper now that their latest generation has been released.

BTW – if you can’t stretch to good graphics cards the AMD APU’s might be worth a look – they have the same CPU architecture as the chip you mentioned but have integrated GPU’s – the only downside is they use a different socket to the FX chips so you can’t swap chips later on.

BigData and Cloud are the buzz words of the moment and if you are so inclined you could pick a couple of applications that can utilise both, learn lots about them and then watch the cash roll in as a highly paid consultant….

In my experience whilst many companies are out sourcing to off shore plenty more are still hiring developers in the UK and the quality of developers out there varies enormously but many are crap.

If you don’t want to have to keep re-learning a new language ever couple of years as fashions change and want to be able to get into consulting a few years down the line I would get into databases – particularly the RDBMS kind to start off with – Oracle or SQL Server although Postgres and MySQL skills are also in demand.

Once you get your head around that pick up some HADOOP, Hive and Pig skills. These are skills that many data professionals think will be in demand over the next 3-5 years as more and more companies start trying to do stuff with all the unstructured data they can harvest from their websites, sensors, Server logs etc.

The skill will then be to write good MapReduce code to get that unstructured data back into the RDBMS and then into Excel, SharePoint, Reporting Cubes etc. for Self-Serve BI.

Note: None of this may come to pass but there is plenty of hype about it at the moment and Microsoft and the rest are investing heavily. I’ve seen some great demo’s of this start to finish i.e. starting with HADOOP filtering all the way through to PowerBI excel reports on a tablet.

– although another big slug of CO2 has also found it’s way into the oceans as well in recent years – ( a tiny amount compared with the size and chemical composition of the oceans, but enough to shift the alkalinity slightly)

Can someone brainer than I do some maths using Henry’s law to figure out what the PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere would have to be to actual shift sea water from being alkaline to neutral and then to acid? If I remember my GCSE & AS levels properly it would have to be far more than the current 400ppm given the CO2 that enters the ocean will always maintain proportion with the atmosphere.

Not disagreeing that a very small change in ocean PH won’t cause problems for coral reefs and shell fish etc. which is very frightening (whole food chains could collapse – if we haven’t eaten it all by then) but I know the mass media stories about acidic oceans can’t be true i.e. the oceans will not turn acidic – to get from a PH of 8.10 to less than 7 (neutral) would be mental.

This is a good graph to start off with though.

Tom,

No one likes a smart arse but sources/links would be nice. I read the book when first published and haven’t followed the story since.

Junkyard – I never said his story proves that near death experiences are super natural, just that he addresses all the usual explanations given and why they did not apply to him using his medical knowledge and this is what makes it interesting, at the very least it suggested we still have a lot to learn about the human body and brain.

If he is now contradicted by the doctors who treated him or his own medical records c’est la vie. He has done well out of it for someone who is so easily dismissed as suffering from massive brain damage.

After a bit of googling;

It looks like Esquire published a de-bunking article in July which questions the Doctors character and motives – they found mal-practice lawsuits against him and essentially call him a liar about certain embellishments in his story. Shame you have to pay to read the whole thing.

A better article on Scientific American which looks more at the science at less at trying to discredit the Doctor is here:Scientific American Link

I still find the whole thing interesting; it’s been on the list of things to read up for a while along with the whole third man phenomenon (mountaineers experiencing help from someone else when they are alone etc.)

Tom – With regards to this other chap you keep chattering on about is it worth my time reading about him? I’ve never heard of him so I won’t waste my time unless it is of interest.

Its far more littered with areas of study now debunked – mysticism, alchemy, homeopathy, astrology etc and the scientific method was what led to them being replaced. this is sciences strength – you cannot use it as weakness – as it shows that with enough evidence you can persuade science to switch paradigm unlike those of “faith”

Even the wackier ones like expanding Earth theory only got properly demolished in the past 50 years once better technology could be used to measure plate tectonics.

You mean the did some empirical measures , found no evidence of it and rejected it …wow imagine !

You clearly like preaching to the converted, I find myself tempted to strongly argue in agreement with you, but what’s the point, you’ll just find a stronger argument to agree back at me with…

I tell you what explains that. First off, he’s a surgeon and therefore a ****. Secondly, he suffered massive brain damage and consequently lost the plot – real scientists have been known to lose the plot as well and believe in bollocks. The infamous one being Peter Duesberg.

That’s pretty much the type of ad-hominem response I expected 😉

You have not read his book, and yet you describe him as a **** for being a Surgeon and then state he suffered serious brain damage – which if you read the book you would know that he did not.

His recovery in itself is a minor medical mystery as all the machines he was hooked up to showed he was clinically brain dead with no neural activity for an extended period. The doctors looking after him really did not rate his chances of survival.

Having read the book I can pick holes in it and surmise what may have happened with logical explanations… but these are all things he tries to explain as to why he thinks them unlikely – the fact he is a neurosurgeon is what makes this part of the book interesting.

Get hold of a copy and read it; it has some horribly American emotional bits, and the guy was already a church goer before his illness but those are not reasons to dismiss his story out of hand. It’s probably unlikely to change your view point but at least you’d probably have some respect for the chap…

Or the alternative hypothesis that there is nothing happening that cannot be explained by current theory and tools.

Well that certainly fits the bill in some cases – probably most especially when charlatans are at work trying to con people.

However there are just some cases that just cannot be easily dismissed. The book in the link below is a good example – it could be easily dismissed except it happened to a leading neurosurgeon who was able to look at all the usual explanations for what he went through. The guy certainly isn’t crazy and, I’d argue knows more about the human brain than anyone posting in this thread.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Proof-Heaven-Neurosurgeons-Journey-Afterlife/dp/0749958790/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381756893&sr=8-1&keywords=proof+of+heaven

Then there are cases of mysterious disappearances such as those covered by this book:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Missing-411-Western-United-States-Canada/dp/1466216298/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381757233&sr=8-1&keywords=missing+411

Again, very well researched. Both of these are easy to dismiss until you read them and realise the extent to which the authors know their subjects and are backed up by credible witnesses/professionals.

Scepticism is healthy but an open mind that there are still things out there that science can’t yet explain is healthy too. After all science is littered with over turned theories that at one time or another were thought credible. Even the wackier ones like expanding Earth theory only got properly demolished in the past 50 years once better technology could be used to measure plate tectonics.

I would make sure that he does not know the password, that way you will always have control of the account.

Thats achieved by having it linked to the phone – 2 factor authentication – it means even if you have a password and log in from another PC it won’t work without the text message pin that gets sent to the phone, If you have a gmail account you really should enable this.

Googles policy actually states you should be 13 or over to have a gmail account. If his true age of birth gets entered at any point they will lock the account and you have to reenable it with a new DoB.

I worked for a fashion retailer once. They used to have weekly sample sales where you could get some amazing bargains (Best one I remember were Canada Goose jackets for a fraction of the RRP).

I rarely went to them though; total free for all with women fighting over leather handbags for a fiver.

Having said that I think DezB has the true answer.

LittleMissP,

I think that for most people if they decided to wait until they thought they could afford children they never would. Even when I and my partner earned in excess of £60k combined did we feel that we could afford them. Even when earnings were even higher we never did, but somehow we could afford copious amounts of wine and holidays to romantic locations – our children are not called Paris and Cavehouse- in-Granada, but they could be…

Once you actually think you can afford them then in this day and age the chances are you are almost retired. I miss holidays abroad (and being able to enter the Mega on a whim most of all) I’ve not had a new bike since just before Paris arrived and Cavehouse-in-Granada has forced us to move house which completely wiped out all savings and forced the sale of the ‘nice’ cars. Sob.

Do I regret having them though? Well the Mrs sometimes does (her feet swelled and she can’t wear those lovely but expensive shoes anymore or afford to replace them) but I wouldn’t want to be without the little sods now, especially Cavehouse, he is hilarious trying to copy Paris.

Saying have kids is a lifestyle choice is all well and good; but its not in the same league as choosing a Porsche over a Mondeo or even Smoking or not.

For one thing we have plenty of publicity in the press about various studies that put the emphasis on starting a family when you are young as you are healthier, more fertile and can avoid costing the NHS heaps in after care or treatment of complex disorders.

The we have the MissPanda’s who effectively put the emphasis on you should really only start a family when you can afford it (even if that’s not what she actually said).

I don’t think you can argue that either point is incorrect and I can therefore understand why some people choose to start in their twenties and some in their late 30’s.

But it does get annoying to hear mothers (and its usually the mums that catch the flak) getting criticised for doing either.

Anyhow in my case this applied (twice):

Hmmmm, lifestyle choice or maybe just too many glasses of red one night and a shock a month later…..

So actually the lifestyle choice was alcohol and hot rampant sex, and not family – but we’ve learned our lesson as we now can’t afford to buy alcohol and the wife will no longer come near me 😕

Tring

FFS 4 pages and then someone plays Tring! Have you not been aying attention to the rules.

It’ll have to be Uxbridge to try and get some sense back.

A good year for some species, so more numerous?

More drivers than ever before using rural roads thanks to SatNav shortcuts?

The dawning of a new epoch, where animals are trying to rise up against their human overlords but are failing miserably?

Some other nonsense hypothesis such as we’ve screwed the Earths electromagnetic field which many animals are in tune with so now they are just plain dopey?

Self-employed and the jobs you have described would be mutually incompatible. I suspect the more genned up will have seen the IR35 trap and walked away quickly. Mrs Sandwich was expressed a professional interest in the system (this is a bad thing, like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters).

If I had spare time I’d be interested in a job like righty offers if the money was reasonable but IR35 would definitely be a possible issue. The reality would either be a carefully worded contract (and pray HMRC never really look into it) or just sign up with one of the companies like Giant and then accept that the employer contributions also come off your hourly rate – the only possible benefit being able to claim expenses etc.

The logic behind installing it on both machines was that I’d get to learn W7 much quicker. I use the laptop every day, whereas the PC mainly gets used at weekends etc. I’m a bit confused with W7 tbh, my mouse keep freezing, with messages about ‘USB device has stopped working’ etc etc…

That sounds like a hardware or driver issue rather than a Windows 7 issue. If you are using an external USB hub of any kind (keyboard/Monitor/external adapter) try without it or check if it can have a PSU plugged in.

Win 7 ISO downlaods

To answer your original question you can download an ISO file of the Win 7 from the above link. You should be able to run it for 90 days without a product key so you could always test it out and if disappointed revert to XP or if not just buy a copy and activate it.

BTW You can activate Windows several times, this allows for people who have the ‘full’ product and want to transfer the licence to a new machine or for people who upgrade a significant component in their PC. If you only have an OEM licence it is restricted for use on the machine it came with but can still be reactivated post hardware upgrades. Also whilst your machine is usually activated ‘online’ it does not deactivate if it never goes back online after that.

I would be surprised if a win XP laptop would be equipped with a 64bit CPU and even if it did was able to have much more than 2GB or 3GB of Ram installed.

32bit Windows 7 works really well and runs great with just 2GB of RAM. As I’ve said on other threads before 32bit apps actually use less memory than 64bit apps. and 32bit apps running under WOW on a 64bit OS will always use more than on a native 32bit edition of Windows.

If you want to be off XP (and I’d understand why) and don’t want to fork out for a new OS licence for an old machine then Ubuntu or Mint Linux is where you should be looking.

Steam are doing an offer until today. If you buy Rise of Flight (Best WW1 combat sim around) you’ll get il-2 1946 free.

As to what is the best sim it really depends on what you want to do; DCS stuff is the best in terms of modern military and realism but requires a lot of studying for the jets; it does have a P51 Mustang module which is awesome – just going through the engine start up and taxi to the runway takes a while and the take off itself is pant wettingly scary – trying to fight the torque of the RR Merlin takes some doing when on max realism.

Falcon has forked and there are a number of continuation products but Falcon BMS is generally considered the best but you still need the original disk for the installation (copy righted libraries or something).

If I didn’t have kids and a job I could happily lose countless hours to flight sims 🙂

A desktop PC will usually get you a better spec for a lot less than a quality laptop but then its stuck in one place and usually takes up a far bit of room.

If you want portability, space isn’t an issue and your budget is large you could always but a powerful quality laptop plus a separate 22″ or 24″ screen, keyboard and mouse.

There is no reason a good laptop won’t be able to meet your needs but if you are going to be sat in front of it for a lengthy period of time you need a comfortable setup.