tank_rider

I used to but then finally blocked eeenggggodddiddde so i cant get many anymore, not to worry we are finally on broadband at home (Y)

you will need to re-order the devices from which the computer boots, so it boots from the cd first, then the hard drive. This should allow you to run the win xp setup program including the partition and format tools.

I'm at work, I give tf a glance every once in a while, usually on my lunch hour, although things are a little slow at the moment.

i havent had mine done in a while as im growing it, although i go every couple of months to have some of the volume taken out, else it gets too fluffy.

Have you got the bearings in the right way up? I think they have to go in a certain way up else you get the problems you describe (its been a while since i put mine together now)

Another good looking low and low frame. I like the blue too, tis a nice change to the silver of most. As we all know though its how it rides not how it looks thats important.

Congrats everyone, by the sounds of it you all did us proud :)

Sorry for posting when i'm not going to come, I just wanted to say that i've been there in the past and drove the original track, it was great fun, and there are no concerns about rain or anything which is nice.

Another vote for a desktop here too. I have one which i use for CAD and other apps quite a lot. Trying to use a laptop efficiently for CAD would be become annoying after a while, as you cant setup your screen and contact points as easily (yes you could get a keyboard and mouse to use with a laptop but that kinda defeats the object doesnt it?) If you want, i could do you a sepc for a PC, then build it up for you when you go off to uni (you'll be coming over to luf to ride lots anyway. If you definately want to go for a factory build i would try and find an athlon 64 powered system as they are much better performers and run cooler than P4 systems meaning they are quieter and easier to live with. One of my housemates last year had a P4 dell and couldnt leave it on overnight due to the noise it made, whereas my highly overclocked athlon xp was nice and quiet allowing me to leave it on downloading etc overnight. The advantage of a custom built system being that you get exactly what you want, however you have the problem of no service backup (well ill do it but not onsite, or owt).

My thoughts are with all those who have been affected by todays terrible events. RIP to those who lost their lives so needlessly. May those responsible be caught and punished, and have the burdon of those lives they took bearing down on them for eternity.

I'm a huge merissa fan (Y)

I watch it, didn't see any of the first series so downloaded it all and had a massive marathon to watch it all, then have been getting the second series as soon as they are shown in the US. Great ending to the second series, bring on season 3, thats what i say!!

Heres what i recommend, it will give you a balanced and pretty powerful system with enough memory and storage to be able to do pretty much anything you want to. It should also run all the latest games on low resolution and detail settings and pretty much any older game on almost max settings. It is a little over you budget and you would need to factor in the price of a case and PSU, although if you get stuck for a psu you can have my old one for a fiver + p&p. You could go for a cheaper mobo if needs be, something like this, which is still good quality (my experiences with pcchips mobos isnt great) but saves a few quid for only a slight drop in onboard sound performance (the Abit NF7 has particularly good quality onboard sound rivaling some of the cheap sound cards costing £20 or more, mine sounds a lot better than my creative soundblaster live 5.1 card i used with my old mobo). I went with the seagate drive as they have pretty much the best reputation at the moment for hard drives, the kingston RAM should run at CL2.5 at the 333fsb that processor runs at and will still work if you ever want to overclock or move to a 400fsb processor. The fully fledged radeon 9550 (rather than the se version which only has a 64bit memory interface and hense is a fair bit slower) should perform better than the nvidia fx5500 by some margin, and should be overclockable to nion 9600 clock speeds on the core, if not the memory too. Finally samsung make the quietist cd/dvd drives on the market and have good reliability and design, that one is dual layer meaning you can use the larger capacity (9GB compared to 4.7GB) discs should you want too, it can still write the lower capacity ones too though. The thing with building up your own system is that you don't get any software with it, and so either have to factor that into the price, or use dodgy copies. Buying from dell youll obviously get a proper copy of windows, but not much else, as you would probably want full office rather than try to struggle with crappy works.

spikenipples spec is pretty good, nice and balanced, i would spend the extra £5 and go for a better cooler, something like an akasa one, aim for one that can do at least an athlon xp 3200+ speed, then you will never have any temp problems. i had one of these cooling my overclocked athlon xp barton 2600+ and it did the job admirably, i only replaced it as i wanted to get extreme on the overclocking (Y) It may also be worth making the jump to the athlon xp 3000+ as it has the barton core which has extra L2 cache making it perform quite a bit better than the sempron, although it will push you nearer the £250 mark. If you want to investigate going down the Dell route, give them a call and get them to give you a quote for just the tower, without the monitor, keyboard, mouse or speakers, they may not cost much but it should bring the price down a bit.

there you go mate. Has a proper killer body. Sorry about the size of the 2nd one.

I think it looks quite nice actually, lets just hope it is more comfortable than the Yaris, especially for passengers, i had a very bad experience as a passenger in a Yaris on an 8 hour round trip, made me ill!!

My housemate was there working, not sure what stand she was on, more than likely not wearing much though (Y)

sorry i sneakily went back and edited my post having re-read yours ^_^ good ol SM being able to secretly edit stuff :- Siders, what motherboard are you running? as it might be worth selling your current RAM and getting a pair of the OCZ stuff to run in dual channel if it is capable of doing it, then you would get a pretty big increase in RAM bandwidth and hense performance in some programs. Also it would still be helpful to do the whole msconfig thing i said about earlier as well as a couple of defrags to get your pc running as fast as poss, also if you want me to help you sort out your RAM timings give me a shout on msn (andrewhill101@hotmail.com).

speed isnt good when the information is inaccurate (N) not that what you said to get wasn't correct, just the other bit ^_^

the temp internet files get distributed all over your hard drive as you use the web meaning that when they finally get erased your HD becomes very fragmented due to the loads of small amounts of data for larger files spread out everywhere. I would set both the max and min vals to the same (i still recommend 1GB, thats what i have my comp running and i have a gig of RAM anyway), then you loose that disk space straight off, so when you get low on space performance doesnt take as much of a hit due to the downwards adjustment of the virtual memory. In terms of memory, unless you plan on overclocking or upgrading the CPU soon, i would go for whatever is cheaper, make sure you get RAM with a CAS time of 2.5 or lower though else your other stick of ram will match the slower timings of the new one, the timings are important for AMD based systems so the lower the CAS the better. Also your RAM seems to be running at wierd timings as it is, which may be leading to slow performance, the RAS to CAS Delay and the RAS Precharge should both be set to the same value, namely 3 for your RAM. You may need to go into your BIOS to sort that out. Is your system a pre-built one? or did you do it yourself? That OCZ premier with heatspreader is the RAM i am running very sucessfully in my pretty highly overclocked system, although i am only running the RAM at 210Mhz (DDR420) is is still on the stock timings and is running fine, i have had it up to 220Mhz (DDR440) on stock timings when run in single channel (mobo wouldnt do dual channel at that speed :- (i think the northbridge needs better cooling). Unless you are going to overclock i wouldn't bother with the heatspreader as the RAM is guarenteed to run at the stock timings at stock speeds. OCZ is a good brand, their RAM is reliable and has a lifetime warranty so you cant really go wrong. Sorry for the information replication in my first post i wrote it then went and had dinner before finishing it off ^_^

I'm not a fan of the look of that frame. Not really to my taste the whole bent toptube just before the seatube.

always a good idea to clean dust from the fans and heatsinks in your pc, especially if like mine its located on the floor. Increase your virtual memory to a permenant 1Gb, theres no reason not to if you have the spare space. Defrag your hard drive to get all the files grouped together, i suggest you do this a few times to ensure you get it fully sorted. Download CPU-Z from here and take screenshots of the CPU, Memory and the SPD page (for each of the filled RAM slots), and i should be able to identify what RAM should be compatible with your system. Check the number of tasks you have running, lots of programs like realplayer and quicktime have componants that are permenantly running (unless you stop them) which enable them to start up faster should you use that program, however these also use up small amounts of system resources which can add up. Click start, then run, type msconfig click on the startup tab, then look through the list of things that are there, uncheck any like realsched and qttask, check the location of the files, if any of them are located in the program files section and are not things like firewalls or virus checkers, then uncheck them. When you click ok you will get a warning, hit ok, then reboot. On boot up you will get a message, check the don't show me this again thing and hit ok. You should have less shit running when your computer boots up helping increase performance. Clean your temporary internet files and reduce the amount stored by windows. Open internet explorer, hit tools, internet options, in the temporary internet files section hit delete files (this may take a while so don't worry). Then hit settings and reduce the disk space used to say around 50Mb.

Happy B'day dude Have a good'un You got anything planned?

We have had a couple on incidents of this in Loughborough recently. I think the courts should be taking a harsh stand against it to try and stamp it out rather than their usual softly softly stance.

James the rules for advertising are currently being discussed by all the Admin, mods and SMs to try to come up with a set of unambiguous rules that are easy to follow. The links you show do have advertising in them, however there has been a bit of a crackdown of late (sigs etc) to try to prevent "illegal" advertising by all. Advertising needs to be controlled else there would be no use in buying a banner, if the banners disappear then so does the funding for the forum. At the moment it is hard to know what is and isnt advertising, and have had to alter what i would usually type on a few occaisions realising that i was about to plug a shop etc. Anyway back on the subject, the GU looks pretty interesting to me, some different takes on yoke design going on which could have some decent benefits if they can survive the rigors of trials riding. It looks like it should be a pretty stiff frame due to the tight rear end and the plates between the top and down tubes. Anyone ridden one yet?