sasha@lazytrips

I'd help you if it was any other month as I live in Nottingham, but I'm the process of moving down south and have a million other things going on which means I'm only gonna be in town for 2-3 days over the next month and these will be spent packing, cleaning, selling, shoving stuff into vans, driving this stuff up and down the country and all that jazz. My one suggestion is: buy yourself a big case (full tower size) with good quality drive bays & tonnes of fixings (e.g. decent NZXT ones) as they are amazingly newbie-friendly and almost everything can be attached by hand with no tools. Also get yourself a cheapo set of small precision screwdrivers for £3 or whatever from Maplin + a static strap & attach this strap to the computer case & your wrist. There are millions of guides out there, but in short. 1. Open up your case and all the other bits & bobs. 2. stick your motherboard into the case (should be easy to figure out which way this goes. Remember that there are bits that go between the back of the case and the motherboard that keep it away from the metal 3. stick the processor in. You've got to be a little bit careful & check that you're putting it in the right way (align the pins), but this is really very very simple. 4. put some thermal paste on top of the processor & shove the fan on top of it. On a decent motherboard & decent fan, you'll either have no need for tools or very minimal amount of screwdriver action. 5. ping all the other bits that you've got into the slots. Each one can only go into one sort of slot and for everything bar the memory sticks, it makes no difference whatsoever where you shove them. With memory sticks it all depends on how many you've got, what MB you're using and what operating system. 6. stick in your DVD drive & hard drive and attach these to your MB with cables. Spend 20 seconds reading the instructions - this is very very simple. 7. Ping in your modular power adaptor & plug in each component in turn. You really can't get this wrong. 8. Switch it on and install windows. That's it.

All up to you in the end mate. I had no experience of anything similar when I built my first PC. Took me about an hour and a half all in including opening all the boxes, figuring out what goes where for the first time and all that. I would never do anything other build one myself in the future, but that's my choice. I know that if I want to upgrade components, it's very cheap and easy to do whenever I want to, etc. I've had my latest one for a year and a half with quite extensive usage for periods during this time and average usage at others and it literally still feels brand new. Loads in a matter of seconds, feels, looks and performs exceptionally under any load. If you want the piece of mind by all means go with a specialist builder - at the end of the day it's a matter of what you prefer.

I've got a few more stickers above my tax disc with tax paid for a few countries in Europe that require you to pay tax when visiting.

Basically do the following: Get yourself an Ivybridge processor (a fair few quite good additions over the Sandybridge older Intel ones). Something like a 3770K should be right up your street + will be miles ahead of the 2500K at the same overclock speed for almost the same money. Get yourself either a GTX 570 or something like that (slightly older, but still very good performance + cheaper) card or a Radeon 7950 (new + cool features + nice overclocking potential + very very good price). Get yourself a modular 650-750 power supply from a good reputable brand (e.g. OCZ, Corsair) - if this fails, you'll fry a lot of stuff, so don't skimp. Get yourself an SSD if you really want one. If you can wait a few more seconds to boot, get yourself a Spinpoint 1TB drive (or two in RAID - will work almost as quick and give you 2TB of space, but with 2x likelihood of failure over time - if one goes, all your data is gone) Go buy a basic Asus motherboard that supports all the stuff you want, has USB 3 and whatnot and that allows you to play with clock speeds etc on an 1155 socket. Buy a case of your choice - I prefer big ones for airflow + much easier to install things. I swear by NZXT - very good build quality, reasonable price and extremely easy to fit most things with no tools All of the above should net you an £800 PC with far more ponies than what you were looking at before. Ebuyer and Overclockers are good places to source parts.

Abbey Motorsport are based in Surrey and are fantastic. I don't think you'll find a single person who has used them who would say otherwise.

Horses for courses. I prefer the round ones from Halfrauds and have a similar one to the one you had before.

In short, if you want to save money, build the thing yourself. It is far easier than you might think, won't take too long and you get full control of every single component that goes in. If you're using the computer to play games, get yourself the best quad processor you can afford, but don't pay the premium for the i7 double-threaded processors as you will notice no difference in gaming (these are made for things like photo/video work). Only get the "K" version of the processor if you are planning to overclock it as otherwise it is exactly the same as the basic model. If overclocking, you'll need to at least stick a better fan than stock and make sure your case has good cooling. If you tell us a budget, I can tell you how much you can get for that. (remember you'll need to get a version of Windows installed as well which will factor into how much you can spend on everything else.

If you're hiring a car, I would very very highly recommend crossing the border into Italy as the part immediately after you cross the border is fanstastically beautiful with amazing little towns dotted on hilltops, awesome food and imho far better than any of the comparatively fake places on the french side which only exist during the summer months and are tailored to tourists.

It doesn't automatically lock itself - at least mine doesn't.

disconnect the fuse if you can find the right one. Otherwise would disconnecting the battery do the trick? Are your windows shut properly?

11 more zeds died in Q1 2012. Total down to 7,587 - not coming down all that quickly.

1. Your local place is highly unlikely to just have the correct pads in stock for the zed and you'll end up ordering anyway - through them or directly yourself it won't really matter. 2. The windows are already tinted to the maximum legal limit unless you're only talking about the rear window & the small ones behind the pillar. 3. How much hassel(l) (sic) are you prepared to go for just to get a car which happens to have the Rays on? Get a car which is a) the right colour, the right condition & history, c) has the right toys + d) take a look at the mileage, but if all the above are good, I personally wouldn't care too much. Things like Rays alloys will take you about 5 minutes to buy online and another 5 minutes to swap over at your local garage.

If you click on the specific brands at the top, it'll tell you how many you need to buy of each to qualify. In short you'll need to spend a minimum of £7 to get every 10p off up to a min of £35 for the full 50p off. Assuming you can get pretty darn close to empty and fill up with 75 litres at 131.9, you'll be making a saving of 75 x 50p = £37.50. So if you actually want any of the things you can get for £7, you might as well go and get them all and get paid £2.50 for the privilege Coffee seems your best bet here.

Can I ask why you want a Scenic-style aerial mast on your roof? Got a flag to attach to it?

I apologise if this comes across the wrong way and I don't want to be rude, but if you're going to be borrowing £6k on a 3-year finance deal, I presume you have considered all the other associated costs. £500 minimum for tyres, spare parts as and when they may be needed, brakes, etc. etc. etc.

Bear in mind that speedos get pretty inaccurate at those speeds, and I'd be surprised if a Zed could get to 175 anyway. Try it with a GPS and see what happens. Also as already said; pay attention to the throttle response in 1st and 2nd, does it feel spongy or elastic? if yes then you're probably not upreved. DB Hence why I said I hit 156mph and was still gaining. The 156 was gps-based. I've got a UK 2004 DE. That of any help? (+ You've driven mine to/from Heathrow a year ago)

I guess this is easy to tell if you have the option to drive two zeds - one with and one without the restriction. When you don't know any better, it's hard to judge although I couldn't ask for more response in the first two gears.

I am now strongly suspecting that mine was uprevved by the previous owner as I hit 156mph on the autobahn while still accelerating fairly quickly before I had to slow down for traffic. Speedo was showing 170-175.

I don't know the fitment details but in the above a + b is not equal to c. Simple example (not sure if details are 100% correct, but that's not the point): 1. Charger from iPhone 4 works with original iPhone 2. Charger from original iPod works with original iPhone => Charge from original iPod works with iPhone 4. In all likelyhood, you probably can figure something out. Question is whether it is worth it.

If you fancy a black one with some 'trick bits', I'll be posting some photos in my For Sale thread this weekend

This is only the case if you want to swap your car regularly and is also only relevant if you have the cash to purchase outright. Lets say you do this; a) Buy a £35k car and keep it six years. Car is now worth £13-£14k. Hire a car at £7k every two years = £21k spent. a) This person still owns a car with no monthly repayment and can access the £15k in the car if needed. This person has bugger all to show for their £21k apart from swanning around in a brand new car that they never owned. Unfortunately you missed out a crucial part of the calculation. If person a was to borrow the £35,000 to purchase the car (90% of those who do) OR person b was to have the £35k in cash, but stick it into a savings account over the 6-year period rather than handing it over upfront for the car, at something like 6-7% APR (average over last couple of decades), person b would be around £15k better off in addition to the above calculation. So person b would only have spent £6k relative to the £13-14k outlay for person a.

1) I cost my cornflakes every morning with lead filings and 99Ron fuel. 2) I cut the grass by pouring petrol over it and setting fire! 3) I chew on wild rabbits as a snack. 4) I blow my tyres up with my mouth. 5) I shave with a bowie knife. 6) I changed my oil and used my teeth to get the sup plug off! 7) I too changed my oil and drank the waste! 8) I eat my dinner with a pitch fork and machete. 9) My cat has been trained to be the local drug dealer 10) I drive a pick up truck. The manliest vehicle in the known universe 11) I am ians cats best customer 12) When servicing my car I don't use ramps, I hold my car up with my knees 13) I wear barbed wire instead of socks 14) I brush my teeth with a wire brush 15) I drink sand 16) I can do 0-60 in 2.5 seconds. That's twice as fast as my car.

great minds...

The question is really quite simple. You can borrow a car and pay a little bit less than buying one, but you are restricted in what you can do with it/any changes you want to make to it, servicing options, etc, etc. Same as with renting a home vs buying a home or any other similar question. For me personally, the money is a lesser issue when compared to some of the above as I don't want to always be thinking about the miles I put on the car and how that relates to my yearly cap. I want to be able to put on some different/better tyres, change the wheels if I feel like it or do whatever else I want because the car is my pride and joy. If your only need is to have 4 wheels which get you from A to B and you also like these wheels to be fairly new and fresh, then PCP might not be a bad idea. All depends on the inidividual person.

True to a degree. The iPhone still visually looks like a pretty snazzy gadget despite the crazy popularity.