ITidiots.com

Well, we came back from Saudi and realised the house we've owned for 6 years is now quite dated (it is only 11 years old though). So, we have this sort of second living room that we never bothered to do anything with except stick an old TV with a free-view box in and a couple of sofas.

So, we decided the carpet needed ripping up and replacing and a wood floor putting down. Whilst the wood floor was being put down, we wired the room for surround sound (no wires showing anywhere).

Well, my Dad couldn't resist so we now have a new 40" Sony LCD TV with HD Free-view (Sky+HD is coming tomorrow) and it works on the Internet.

It is fantastic. You can stream videos and stuff straight to your TV and watch it like it was actually being broadcast live. It looks great and it is honestly better than sitting in front of the TV. They are also going to bring out a better iPlayer for it than the PS3 (though I feel that the PS3 one is fine apart from when choosing what to watch it looks a bit small, unless they've updated it since Nicky first used it).

So, 10/10 for the whole Sony shi-bang. Apart from the fact that the speakers are from the danish company Jamo - but with a Sony HD amp...

Well, I didn't pay for the stuff - my Dad did.

We have also just ordered another "system-board" for my laptop as the graphics chip has literally blown. A lovely £350 for the pleasure... I could just buy a new laptop...

Nope, my money has now gone into a savings account so I can pay for flying lessons and all that wonderful certification and licenses... it is more expensive than the IT certifications...

Yep, the Sony stuff is good. The only problem with Sky is that we now need two dishes on either side of the house (we have a big house) as the plug in the lounge is too far from the dish (we had that put in years ago from when we had regular Sky before we left to go to Saudi). So, there are now two big holes in the wall at either side of the house. And we now have two dishes. But it does mean we can technically have 8 boxes on multiroom now... (4 per dish).

@joey pesci - No, I'm back in the UK now - I don't live in Saudi anymore. And nope they didn't have it. The furthest you can get Sky is Cyprus and freeview, Isle of White.

@Supernova - £1000 could quite easily get me 5 or 6 lessons with room to spare! Plus I'm looking into certain discounts which I don't particularly wish to disclose on the intertubes...

My laptop does have a separate chip, it is mounted on the board. Unfortunately, these are not sold separately (as far as I know) and the new system-board comes with a graphics chip, but not a CPU. I could just get a new laptop, but this one cost me over £1000 and it runs great normally. It works out cheaper to fix it and then install Windows 7 on it than to buy a new one that would be messy and would need "tweaking" in terms of software to get it to run again.

The good news is that I have the stuff needed to make the modification to the heat sink, the bad news is that the system board won't arrive until Thursday...

Lol, agreed.

If you get Sky+ at the moment, they include the HD box for free. So, basically, you get all the "free" HD channels down it (BBC, ITV, CNL4, FIVE) and Channel 5 is the best out of the lot in my opinion - even the adverts look HD!

And right now when it is awful weather, very heavy dark grey cloud and heaps of rain, no drop outs whatsoever. I think Sky have definitely upped their game since I last used them 2 years back. They now stick two cables through instead of one as well to improve signal.

I've always had NVidia and they last for years! I think it is because of the design fault of the laptop that these problems are arising!

I don't know if anyone has taken a look at my website (www.flybia.cz.cc) lately or flightsim.com, but I am now up to 32 pilots in the space of 24 hours.

That's 34 manually typed e-mails to send out! Not wishing to go off topic or boast, but that's more than ITIdiots!

The one thing with Sky Broadband is it is very fast, but the router they provided is awful. The wireless only stretches 2 metres! And our old router just won't work! Even after changing all the IP addresses, Mac address, username etc...