If I was to own the car for 4 years, say, it would cost me somewhere in the region of £23,000 excluding tax and petrol. I could either buy the insurance or drive around uninsured in a fleet of 7 VW Golfs — one for every day of the week. Which one would you choose?

I ordered a new heatsink (Akasa AK-965) and today I attempted to install it. Of course, uninstalling the old one was difficult and there’s always that little niggle that makes you think you’re doing it wrong. I continued, though, and managed to vacuum the incredible amount of dust that had amounted over the 2 years.

I was in the final throes of completion, I only had to place the new heatsink into its place, pop the screws and plug the fan in. Of course, in the final stages, something has to go wrong and for this little endeavour, everything did. First, I found that the heatsink didn’t line up the motherboard’s holes. Secondly, I found that the motherboard didn’t have a connection for the heatsink’s fan (rather, a different connection to what the new heatsink needed). Thirdly, I’d already taken all the old thermal paste off the processor at this point and it looked like I’d need to buy some more. And finally, no matter how hard I tried to be careful, I managed to get thermal paste all over my fingers. Sending back the heatsink will cost £5 — for a £10 product. To finish off, as I’ve had to dismantle half my computer, I’ve now got two screws and I don’t know where they went.

It’s not all bad though: I’ve managed to scrape some of the new thermal paste onto the old heatsink (and temperatures have fallen dramatically), I’ve been able to clean the fan and heatsink and I have a spare heatsink for a computer I hope to be building this autumn.

At least the Jag was in the drive, though.

Despite being only officially available to the Japanese market, I’ve seen several of these in England. It’s about as aerodynamic as a small village and is just devastatingly ugly.

You can use choose between a 1.4 litre or a 1.5 litre I4 engine — the 1.4 litre has a huge 84 horsepower.

The most positive thing that struck me about this car was what the size of the boot would be. Sadly, looking at it more closely, all that space is taken up by a second row of chairs.

To sum up: it has a poor engine, a tiny boot, ugly exterior, ugly interior and an import tax. Really?

Computers count in base two – that is, binary. In binary, a kilobyte is 1024 bytes (2 to the power of 10). Normal people considered a “kilo” to mean a thousand so a kilobyte, to them, was 1000 bytes. If you sell hard drives, the obvious choice is to use the measurement that sounds like more value – the non-geek 1000 was therefore used (1MB = 1,048,576 bytes in binary or 1,000,000 bytes in metric – less is cheaper to make although less in usable capacity). In 1998, the IEC defined 1GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes – using the non-geek/manufacturer method. To avoid confusion, they also decided to rename measurements of binary by replacing the last two letters with “bi” to represent “binary” (kibibytes, mebibytes, gibibytes, tebibytes). The thing is, though, these new names sound terrible and they will never be picked up. In reality, everyone uses the original names and ignores the stated capacities on hard drives.

If you’re mathematically inclined, you’ll notice that the difference is 7%; to find out the real capacity of any hard drive, just take off 7%.

The .mobi TLD was created because browsers and mobile/cell phones were completely different — different screen sizes, different needs and different input methods. A portable web just wouldn’t work so a new one (or a separate version) had to be created.

The screens in cars are more than adequate to be used to navigate the web and whilst the input devices still need a little work, I see no benefit of this proposed TLD. Touch-screen capabilities can easily be fitted and voice activation can make up for a keyboard-like input.

Drivers wouldn’t be allowed to surf the Internet whilst driving anyway; only passengers would be able to and their attention would be drawn to the device like it would at home. Therefore creating a simpler, easier-to-read version just wouldn’t be worth it.

The idea that you would be able to listen to news headlines or even entire web pages whilst on the move uses the technology of text-to-speech — where text is digitally spoken (albeit a little robot-like) so you can hear the text instead of having to read it. This method directs me straight to accessibility. If your site doesn’t make sense in a logical order then text-to-speech engines are useless or extremely annoying. This isn’t just affecting the in-car users but blind users as well. Preventing them from accessing the web page is against the law and, although very unlikely, you could be sued.

Now the costs are through the roof — £60 to £70 a month for 2mbps Internet, a few TV channels we never watch and a phone line that’s not often used.

Internet

I can’t live without the Internet and use it heavily. Online TV is starting to properly come through now with BBC iPlayer and various on-demand services. With 2mbps, I could enjoy these services quite happily but I’m not getting 2mbps. The problem is Virgin Media’s STM — their way of stopping anyone from actually achieving what they paid for. During certain times, if you download over a certain amount, the connection will be limited. STM was introduced because Virgin Media claimed that they found that 5% of their customers were affecting the speeds of the other 95% — to me, that sounds like their infrastructure can’t take the strain. Instead of upgrading the infrastructure, they decided to ruin it for their loyal customers whilst still rolling out ultra-fast broadband and doubling high-end packages.

Want to know these “limits”? I bet you’re expecting something high — because, of course, to have to limit the service, it would have to be high! It is in fact, stupidly low and so insanely low that most packages can reach the limit in 10 to 20 minutes.

TV

The TV service is what you’d expect. There are only about 10 channels worth watching, most of which are available on Freeview.

Virgin Media’s catch-up and on-demand service is still something to be desired; it’s clunky menus and buggy system means that the chance you’ll be able to find and watch something all the way through is slim. Try pausing, rewinding and fast-forwarding to see how unstable it is.

The Solution

After my 30 days notice, I’ll be changing ISPs to Be (24mbps), getting Freeview and a BT phone line — all this for half of what I’m paying for now? If you have Virgin Media then I suggest you do the same!

Another Project that I’ll have to start work on is an idea that combines Yahoo! Answers, Google and StumbleUpon. Trust me, it’ll be great!

After a year over it’s official launch, though, I think it’s finally ready for consumer use. Before was a minefield of shattered expectations and defunct drivers; now it’s so much more able and automated. There are a few minor things that still annoy me but there are many things that amaze me with it which make XP look pathetic and humorously basic.

With Vista’s new price drop and SP1 around the corner, anyone buying a new computer should definitely consider Vista.