sasha@lazytrips

My thinking was that instead of spending the extra £70 or thereabouts on a more expensive PSU now, I'll put the money into more crucial components which I'll regret not getting and then upgrade the CPU whenever I get the second card.

I'm planning to build a computer and plan to place the order in a week or thereabouts. Are there any computer literate people who can advise as to whether all the different components are compatible and/or any improvements without any more money being spent? The idea was to get the maximum I can right now with a view to upgrades over time. I plan to get a secondary 460 card to put into SLI with the first, gradually build up to 16GB RAM by adding sticks as and when (can then go all the way to 32GB if needed) and will add 2-3 more identical hard drives in a RAID 10 set up for some SSD-beating performance. I'll be getting Windows 7 & Office elsewhere. The PSU is moderately cheap and I can always replace it when more components make it into the system. PCU: Intel Core i7 2600k Mobo: Asus P6P67 PRO PGU: Gigabyte ATI GTX 460 1GB RAM: Corsair 1x4GB 1600MHz Vengeance DDR3 stick PSU: Corsair 500W CX PSU ODD: Sony 24x DVD-RW HDD: Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3 1TB 7200rpm 32MB Cache Case: NZXT Phantom White Case Wireless card: Tenda Wireless-N300 PCI Adapter (read rave reviews of this card) Opinions?

Will see if it comes back. It may well be that my second exhaust has cracked somewhere which would be annoying, but at least it's not as bad as it originally sounded when I heard the engine running rough! I'll see if I can get half an hour at lunch to have a look at it in the daylight tomorrow. Thanks!

Was panicking on the phone earlier. I've reset the ECU and made it about half a mile further down the road. I got 1166 & 1167 together which indicates that the Heated O2 Sensor 2 has issues but after the reset the car sounded a lot better and seemed absolutely fine on the short drive. Should I be worried? How expensive are these sensors to replace and how hard is it to do? I have no idea where this thing sits and how hard it is to get to it and whether these codes could mean anything else being wrong.

i've got 1166 error on the way back tonight. anyone know what that is?

4 hours

I'm not sure on the rattling, but the 2nd gear issues you described are what some would describe as a "feature" of the gearbox. Most of them behave that way and need to get warm to behave.

it would be interesting if someone with half a braincell actually came up with some smart campaign to affect petrol prices rather than all the garbage that we all get emailed. Something like doing your absolute best and not buying petrol for 1,2 or 3 days right at the end of the Financial year and waiting until afterwards could be rather amusing given that a number of government metrics, borrowing arrangements and rating agency classifications, etc, etc are done on Financial Years and while in the long run this won't impact the amount of money the government generates in tax, vertically, there could be some major issues. I'm sure there are other much smarter ways of having a real impact rather than boycotting one particular petrol station. As many mentioned before, 75% of the price of petrol is made up of the fuel levy & vat. The remainder is chiefly split into a number of contractual and other overhead costs, staff & profit. Profit gets taxed for Corporation tax, wages get taxed with Income Tax and there are a number of levies and associated charges with the types of contractual arrangements these companies make as well as all other forms of tax that they pay on refineries, road tax on tankers, taxes on ships & mooring, etc, etc. All in all, in one cycle of the monetary turnover of an Oil Company selling Petrol in the UK, somewhere around 85% will go straight into the Government's pocket. Given all this, the huge bashing one of my beautiful rims received in a monster pothole on a dual carriageway makes me pretty annoyed as I believe that given the above + road tax + tax on the insurance we pay + etc, etc, etc, you would only have to spend a fraction of this amount of money on the roads to keep them in a condition like a number of European countries. Afterall, it is the roads which generate the tax in the first place. [/rant]

I love the fact that Cynthia's surname is "Steele"

I've been having thoughts on and off and have an interesting but incredibly mysterious and top secret plan which involves driving the car hard for 24 hours with only a few short stops for fuel. Having browsed the depths and breaths of the forum, I haven't found any reviews of how the car would cope with sitting at moderate revs for that long and what if anything would need doing before undertaking something like that. A few important points are that there would be at least one reasonable section of around 3-4 hours probably sitting at or around at least 5k revs for 3-4 hours. I've got the VQ35DE and although I am well aware of its "bulletproof" credentials, has anyone either done something similar or read anything about a zed in a standard-ish set up doing something of the sort? What about other bits like the tranny, tyres, etc?

Got a killer question: Given that the numberplate for Jap imports is narrow, is the hole above it & the light cluster also narrower? I need to fix an issue with having to take the bumper off to change bulbs and need to find out if I can just get a replacement light cluster instead. Cheers.

I'm not going to be very helpful as other more techy people will know what they're talking about, but seeing as it's your first post, you are pressing the clutch, and you do have petrol in the car, right? Have you recently bought some cheap petrol (eg. Asda)? If so, it may well have frozen all the way through to the line and the click you're hearing is starter motor/ignition trying to spark something with nothing coming through.

That wasn't risking. The risking was when I went driving round North Wales buying a specific Christmas present. There was one particular hill with ice all the way up and particularly slippery at the top where I couldn't get up. A couple cars stopped and asked if I needed help, but the ground was so slippery, there was no use for any pushing. So I did the natural thing and told them I'm gonna take a run up. Let the car slide all the way down, accelerated a bit, then planted the foot and went Japanese drifter style up the long hill, right-to-left-to-right etc. The Tesco car park was a haven afterwards!

I was as usual not paying any attention only to be reminded of the presence of another zed by the horn as it was coming the other way. Looked in the mirror, but couldn't make anything out in the dark. Think it was a GM/silver.

Early on in the show, when they wake up to 'discover a racetrack in the garden', the first shot shows a Yellow Nismo zed pulling round a corner onto the track.

Having just done a trip down to Bavaria, my main suggestion is go find some very decent screenwash. Almost all available in the UK freezes at -5 or higher which is not good when gunning along a motorway, getting splashed and your windscreen freezing when you put the wipers on. That was far and away my biggest problem.

My wife has owned her car for 4 months. We were driving along and I turned off the radio for a bit by pressing the big power button only to hear "how did you just do that?".

Drove all around Germany over the last week on rubbish summer tyres, albeit in a 4wd TT with all the ice & snow that was around. From what I got, it is not illegal to drive with summer tyres, but in the case of an accident, regardless of the circumstances you are liable if you have summer tyres and your insurance will not pay out.

Drove back from Bavaria and gone up and down the country overnight clocking in something just over 1,000 miles in a day. Mind you that was in a quattro TT for the European drive. Belgium was pretty bad with scenes reminding you of northern Canada or summat, but we made it in one piece You get a real knack of gunning down snow-covered motorways with no visibility or grip after 5-600 miles of it.

I'm off to Bavaria in a few hours (although taking the mighty TT instead). Good luck to all the weekend travellers!

Had a new 2010 TTS for a couple weeks recently. Was a perfectly nice car and I only have positive things to say. The interior and all the little things are obviously very nice seeing as it's an Audi, however, for whatever reason I really missed the raw, jagged feel of the zed and the somewhat 'retro' aspect to driving one instead of a new german marque. The whole smooth gear changes, sound dampening, user-friendly controls and stuff is really nice (so much so, guess what my wife's car got upgraded to a week later), but I'm still firmly in the zed camp for no apparent logical reason.

The more people like you the better it is for people like me who enjoy the empty roads on my 120-mile commute back home.

Ermmmm I do too...especially if they are male!!! every horse & lb torque counts!

I must be the only person who when placed next to an obnoxiously revving neighbour at traffic lights, who is trying to jump a queue of cars by going straight from a lane designed for right turns only, apart from all the other obvious necessary steps turns off the aircon, radio & heated seats in preparation...

I'll offer him £12.50 for the GT-R if there are no other takers.