You can run but you can't hide. They [iwill[/i find you...

yawn fanboy

That's actually a great suggestion, the Wii is easily the best family console. Everyone can play and it's a lot of fun. I know several people who don't know play any games who have bought one after playing on my Wii.

Oh completely forgot about Kinect, even though I have one and it is fun, the problem is the selection of good games for it is quite limited; no issues with it working though and it is vastly superior over the PS3's move.



at the suggestion of me being a fan boy. I'm simply a gamer and I call it as I play it, I have every mainstream console released over the last 30 years; I have no bias to one brand.

It will only be used every six months however. The best thing about the Wii is it's small form factor. It will fit easily and unnoticably in any cupboard under the stairs or in the wardrobe upstairs. No need to loft it for when relatives descend for their yearly visit at Christmas or when you are roped into actually purchasing a new game for it. Wii has the longevity of a chocolate bar.

Once the novelty factor of the Wii has worn off its consigned to a life in the cupboard. This is probably why you can pick them up for £100 now with a game. Especially now with Kinect for the xbox and Move for the Playstation its kind of lost its market share to the bigger, better console

Can anyone recommend any media players to plug in to my tv? Been looking on the internet and there are loads to choose from so just wondering if anyone has any experience?

I need something that can play pretty much anything I can throw at it including MKV's and h.264 files etc, Doesn't necessarily need an internal hard drive so long as it can support NTFS externally, Fat32 isn't good enough for my larger BR rips and i dont want to be splitting them up. Im willing to pay anything upto around £80.

I've been looking at the [url=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005H5VJKS/ref=asc_df_B005H5VJKS5651256?smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&tag=googlecouk06-21&linkCode=asn&creative=22206&creativeASIN=B005H5VJKSSony BDP-S185[/url Which looks pretty decent and has BBC Iplayer which is an added bonus but im just not sure if it supports NTFS.

The Wii's initial sale price was £180, that was in 2006. It's dropped a [imassive[/i £80. Unlike the Xbox and PS3 which have had bigger drops.

It hasn't lost its market share either, it's sold nigh on 90 million, compared to the PS3, 55.5 million and the Xbox, 57.5 million. I believe it still out sells both.

As for the only useful every six months, well that's entirely relative. It's a fun console which the whole family can play together.

Quote ="Robbo"Can anyone recommend any media players to plug in to my tv? Been looking on the internet and there are loads to choose from so just wondering if anyone has any experience? I need something that can play pretty much anything I can throw at it including MKV's and h.264 files etc, Doesn't necessarily need an internal hard drive so long as it can support NTFS externally, Fat32 isn't good enough for my larger BR rips and i dont want to be splitting them up. Im willing to pay anything upto around £80. I've been looking at the [url=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005H5VJKS/ref=asc_df_B005H5VJKS5651256?smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&tag=googlecouk06-21&linkCode=asn&creative=22206&creativeASIN=B005H5VJKSSony BDP-S185[/url Which looks pretty decent and has BBC Iplayer which is an added bonus but im just not sure if it supports NTFS.'" Some really good Sumvision players here bit.ly/sURE3u

Quote ="Robbo"Can anyone recommend any media players to plug in to my tv? Been looking on the internet and there are loads to choose from so just wondering if anyone has any experience? I need something that can play pretty much anything I can throw at it including MKV's and h.264 files etc, Doesn't necessarily need an internal hard drive so long as it can support NTFS externally, Fat32 isn't good enough for my larger BR rips and i dont want to be splitting them up. Im willing to pay anything upto around £80. I've been looking at the [url=http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005H5VJKS/ref=asc_df_B005H5VJKS5651256?smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&tag=googlecouk06-21&linkCode=asn&creative=22206&creativeASIN=B005H5VJKSSony BDP-S185[/url Which looks pretty decent and has BBC Iplayer which is an added bonus but im just not sure if it supports NTFS.'" Some really good Sumvision players here bit.ly/sURE3u

Quote ="Big Graeme" Some really good Sumvision players here bit.ly/sURE3u'" Thanks, I've actually read good reviews about some of those, and for £25ish I guess its not too much of a gamble. My xbox is struggling to play a lot of my files now which leaves me having to play them through media centre which means having my noisy pc left on whilst watching certain things. So something like that looks ideal.

Quote ="Big Graeme" Some really good Sumvision players here bit.ly/sURE3u'" Thanks, I've actually read good reviews about some of those, and for £25ish I guess its not too much of a gamble. My xbox is struggling to play a lot of my files now which leaves me having to play them through media centre which means having my noisy pc left on whilst watching certain things. So something like that looks ideal.

I've searched and searched for years to find a decent media centre and failed so many times. I'm suited now though with my HP Ultra Small Form Factor DC7900 that I've had for three years. Got a couple of 1TB external WD My Passports connected to it and VLC media player that plays just about any file you can throw at it. Helpt that the device is as small as a DVD player and ive got a media remote and wireless keyboard and mouse.

They're not bad little devices at all and you can get the for £100 on ebay

Quote ="Robbo" Quote ="Big Graeme" Some really good Sumvision players here bit.ly/sURE3u'" Thanks, I've actually read good reviews about some of those'" If out TV didn't have a media player built in I'd be buying one of those little beauties.

Quote ="Robbo" Quote ="Big Graeme" Some really good Sumvision players here bit.ly/sURE3u'" Thanks, I've actually read good reviews about some of those'" If out TV didn't have a media player built in I'd be buying one of those little beauties.

What transfer speed should I expect from a usb 2.0 pen drive? Im putting videos onto my 8gb drive and struggling to get speeds of more than 4mb per second which is painfully slow. is this normal? I've tried it in a few different ports which are all 2.0 and i dont exactly have any other usb devices other than a mouse and keyboard taking load away from the usb controller.

That's about right for writing to a flash drive.

Problem solved then

This has probably been asked a zillion times but I'm going to ask it again...

Netbook or Tablet ?

I, or rather the youngest, has fallen in love with [url=http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/samsung-nf110-10-1-netbook-black-11306318-pdt.htmlthis netbook in PC World[/url today, or a couple of others which are within £30 of that price, that Samsung has the best combination of HDD size and battery life though, seems to have a good quality display and of course she likes the colour of it.

We also looked at tablets but while I know my way around PC's and Windows I admit to being baffled with the cheaper tablets and Android and low memory and storage capacity, and then there is the keyboard issue, not sure if we could cope without a "proper" keyboard.

So its probably easier if I explain, the whole family use PC's, we have two traditional desktop PC's and I bring my 10" laptop home from work every night and that gets snaffled too - these days we use nothing that isn't on the internet apart from me who uses photo fixing software now and again.

The PCs are used to check online bank accounts, listen to Spotify, and use the likes of Facebook, Twitter and this goddamn web site too, quite a lot of music is downloaded and stored on an external drive and I sometimes watch iPlayer and the occasional streamed film, we've never downloaded films onto the PC's.

The laptop gets handed around every night because its easier to boot up than the PC's (which are getting a bit bloated) and we're now thinking of having a family netbook that will be used exclusively for web browsing by any of us, a quick boot-up machine would be excellent.

Any recommendations gratefully accepted and will anyone persuade me that a tablet is the way to go ?

I'd favour netbooks over tablets, the fact I'm typing on one now is neither here nor there

The range of software for netbooks is pretty much anything you can find for Windows (games excepted)

I find tablets pricey for what you get and can be quite under powered, having said that the first thing you need to do is add another 1GB of RAM to any netbook to get it to a decent spec so either get them to add it in the store or make sure you can do it yourself.

Those Samsung are pretty good, Toshiba do some very good ones, Acer too.

I'll just make this a short post and say Netbook over a tablet every time. Unless you have some particular need to use it with one hand.

Treat the family to a Macbook Air Mr Field...

S.

Didn't even go anywhere near the Mac displays in PC World the other day and from what I've just seen on google your Macbook Air is at least three to four times the cost of a reasonable Netbook, given the use that it will be put to how will I get three to four times as much benefit, or is the pose premium in the region of £600 or so ?

The MacBook Air is not in the same same class as a "netbook".

A PC equivalent of the MacBook Air would be the [url=http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/8/2546923/lenovo-ideapad-u300s-ultrabook-reviewLenovo U330s[/url.

Which is an excellent machine and I would highly recommend over any "netbook".

PC World have knocked £500 off its predecessor (the U260) so it is just £600, which is a bit of a steal.

The big difference between a tablet and a "netbook" is the tablet will have software designed to run on the hardware (given less memory (RAM) and a slightly slower CPU + GPU) A tablet will have specialist hardware as well to aid performance for certain tasks: For decoding HD video, a tablet will typically have a dedicated decoder chip, whereas a "netbook" won't. Web browsers on tablets do a better job of scaling pages for the form factor than a desktop web browser will do on a "netbook". Games are made specifically for tablets on iOS/Android. These games take advantage of multi-touch, accelerometers, gyroscopes etc. No one makes games optimised for a "netbook".

"Netbooks" have a string of hardware deficiencies (cramped keyboard, cramped trackpad, small, low resolution screen), but (and it is a big but) will still typically to run software designed for far more powerful PCs with larger screens and a mouse or generously sized trackpad.

Multi-Touch capacitive input beats fumbling around with a finicky trackpad. For keyboards: Android and iOS will both support almost any Bluetooth keyboard, which will be far bigger and more spacious than the cramped version on a netbook.

I've included netbooks in quotes because I have never believed them to be anything more than small, under powered laptops. Samsung aren't even going to bother making netbooks next year. Microsoft aren't that interested in them, nor are Intel. I think that says it all.

If you really want to spend the same sort of cash as you would on a macbook air may I suggest the home version of the Lenovo X220. Got a X220 as my latest work laptop and its fantastic. The tablet doubles as touch screen, its light and portable and the i7 really gives it some oomph. Only downside is the HDD size

But surely as tablets run different software - it's all relative. They might look under powered on the spec sheet, but it don't think anyone using a modern tablet will find it underpowered. It will startup fast, resume instantly, launch applications quickly, switch applications quickly, render web pages quickly etc. Also, unlike that netbook (with its 320 GB 5400rpm disk), all tablets will use solid state storage.

I think how we look at hardware will change over the next few years - the assumption that more == better isn't always true when looking at portable devices. When discussing about the memory footprint reductions in Windows 8 against Windows 7, [url=http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/07/reducing-runtime-memory-in-windows-8.aspxSteven Sinofsky[/url made a case that 512MB of RAM is sometimes not better than 1GB:




But the industry is far more interested in making thin + light laptops or tablets. And those are the two options which seem to [url=http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/26/2516622/tablet-exceed-netbooks-android-increasingsell the best[/url.

[url=http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/22/apples-tim-cook-why-dont-we-make-netbooks-because-they-suck/Tim Cook[/url basically had it right on netbooks. It was easy to laugh at as he made those comments, but he looks quite prophetic as now manufacturers are [url=http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/15/2639138/dell-quits-netbookslining up[/url to [url=http://www.engadget.com/2011/11/25/is-samsung-giving-up-on-netbooks-next-year/exit[/url the netbook market.

Thanks for the comments PTB, those opinions are appreciated.

I was looking again yesterday at what is on offer, a problem running Chrome on my desktop popped up yesterday and I almost can't be d to fix it now so its concentrated the issue of whether to go for a dedicated Net-only player in the house.

As with all decisions I tend to focus on what is required and in this case its quite simple - something to browse the internet on, something that doesn't cost the earth, something that has no fripperies that aren't required.

Outside of my work stuff I rarely use software that isn't online now, photo editing is probably the only thing I do offline and the netbooks on the retail shelves now have plenty of disc space and probably enough memory for The Gimp which can be downloaded online, so the lack of a CD/DVD player isn't going to cause too many issues.

My two daughters have not been known to use a piece of HDD-based software, they just need online access but they have commented that they prefer a "real" keyboard, they both have touch screen smart phones and don't like the screen keys at all, that alone is pointing me towards a Netbook although of course you can buy "real" keyboards for tablets, which then makes it an expensive Netbook...

My wife needs to be online to check the bank accounts, keep in touch with her family etc but rarely uses HDD based software, again a "real" keyboard is important to her as is minimum delay in booting up.

We don't need gaming capabilities, sound repro has to be good but inbuilt speakers aren't so much of an issue as headphones will be used, video repro has to be good, and its a shame that none of the Netbooks I have looked at have HDMI output.

For around £200 I can satisfy all of our online needs from several Netbooks and there are a couple of smaller Android tablets that fall into the budget too but they are small (7" screen) and the safety of a Windows operating system can't be underestimated I'm afraid.

HELP!

I need to block World of Warcraft on my home network (that game is the spawn of the devil). Obviously the 'polite request' route didn't work initially.

From there I have gone into the router settings and set up the built-in firewall to block the relevant ports. I changed the default username/password for the router settings to stop anyone accessing and removing the exceptions...this worked for a couple of days however they then found (apparently after much trawling online which confirmed the source of the problem) the magical 'reset to factory settings' button on the Sky router which restored everything to default, including my password I had set. This allowed access with the default details printed on the router and they found, and removed, the exceptions.

Is there anything I can do from here, short of opening the router and sabotaging the 'reset to factory settings' button which probably isn't very wise? I had hoped for some sort of firewall software I can operate from my personal system that will stop all computers on the network accessing specific ports - that way they won't be able to access any of these settings. I presume there must be something I can do as (for example) our work router is in our office but the limiting of access appears to be managed centrally by our IT department in Manchester somehow.

Any help would be much appreciated.