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At last… kicking and screaming our way out of the 1990’s, we’ve finally bought ourselves a widescreen TV.

When we arrived in Australia I was quietly disappointed that our 15-year old, square, Sony CRT survived the journey. I was secretly hoping it would die during transit so that we could replace it with something more modern.

Today we bit the bullet and decided to spend our recent tax rebates on a shiny new flat-screen TV. There’s a bewildering range on offer — Plasma or LCD? SD, HD or “Full HD”? 42″, 46″ or 50″? 100Mhz? Buy a cheaper one now or buy a better one to last a good few years?

Having done my homework over the past few weeks, I knew which model I wanted — a Sony Bravia X series — but getting approval from the financial controller was another matter entirely. So I had a few cheaper options lined up when we went shopping this morning.

We mooched around The Good Guys, Retravision and JB Hifi, playing the salesmen against each other — it wasn’t difficult to get 15% off the already-discounted sale prices.

The Sonys were still quite a bit more than we wanted to pay but, thanks to a timely promotion, this month they come with a free PS3 console. That can flogged on Ebay for $750, bringing the cost of the TV down to almost an affordable level.

So, after a bit of traipsing around, we ended up coming home with a 46″ Bravia XBR — it barely fitted in the back of the Land Rover, it’s bloody massive!

Tonight, after watching Match of the Day, we enjoyed Casino Royale — well, it is Christmas after all — it was like being at the cinema!

Christmas Dinner was at our house this year. We were joined by Andy, Johanne, John, Marian and all the kids and, despite the weather, we laid on a full traditional dinner with all the trimmings.

We ordered a 6kg turkey from the local butcher which, fortunately, just about squeezed into the oven. All the veggie peeling and preparation was done on Monday, which made things a lot easier for us on Christmas Day.

It was a good day — everyone ate too much, had a few drinks and enjoyed a nice relaxing afternoon.

Presents-wise, Sara got a new mobile phone and a digital camera. I got a much-needed new keyboard and mouse for my computer. Boo Boo got a bouncer to match her pram, plus heaps of cute clothes.

Last Saturday I bought all the components for my new PC. I ended up going for the Core2Duo 4300 processor, Gigabyte 965P-DS3Pro motherboard, MSI 7900GS video card with 2x 1Gb Kingston DDR2 memory. The choice of cases wasn’t great at MSY, but I settled for a nice piano-black Antec Sonata II case with a near-silent 450W PSU.. Total outlay $1043 (£425).

Building it was quite straightforward and it booted up first time without any drama. I installed Windows Vista and then decided to see how far I could overclock things. I started out cautiously, increasing the clock speed from 200 to 220 (i.e. going from 1.8Ghz to 2.0Gz) and didn’t notice any difference in temperature, so I just kept going up, 20Mhz at a time.

I actually managed to get all the way up to 3.0Ghz before it started getting quite hot, so I’ve settled on running it at 2.66Ghz for now, the same speed as the $735 E6700 — not bad for a $235 chip! If I find that I need more grunt, I’ll buy a better heatsink/fan and overclock it even more, but for now it’s more than fast enough.

I’ve got to say that Windows Vista is fantastic. Once you’ve used it for a few days you can’t go back to Windows XP. I’m now going through the boring process of reinstalling all the bits of software that I had previously and, so far, I haven’t found anything that Vista doesn’t like, except my old Wireless Intellimouse Explorer which works OK but I can’t reprogram the thumb buttons to my liking.

I’ve also installed a couple of games, just to see what this video card can do. Supreme Commander looks amazing, but I don’t really have time to play it at the moment. Command & Conquer “Kane’s Revenge” is due out this month, so I’ll probably waste a few (dozen) hours on that, for old time’s sake.

My computer is dying. As I mentioned six months ago, it was poorly when it arrived in our container from the UK and has deteriorated even more since then.

My video card has now died completely and the AGP socket on the motherboard no longer works at all. I’m currently stuck with the crappy on-board graphics card which isn’t great, especially under Windows Vista. On top of that, the power supply seems to “breathe” when the computer is busy; it’s not just the fan, it’s a loud electrical hum that can only mean bad things are about to happen soon.

So I need a new PC.

Having worked in various computer companies for the last 15 years, I’ve always been able to acquire bits and pieces from here and there without spending a lot of my own money. Unfortunately I have to buy this one myself, so I’m going to build something half decent in the hope it will last a few years.

I’ve done a bit of research this morning and, unless someone advises me differently, I’ve pretty much decided on the following components:

• Intel Core 2 Duo Processor — from what I’ve read today, the newly launched E4300 model could be extremely overclockable. With a bit of tweaking, it should be possible to make this bottom-of-the-range chip outperform the 3.4Ghz extreme editions that cost six times as much. [$297]
• Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 motherboard — It has all the features I could need and seems to be a favourite amongst the overclocking enthusiasts, who managed to get 3.38Ghz out of this 1.8Ghz rated CPU. [$189]
• Geforce 7900GS video card — I’m not going to pay crazy money for a top-end graphics card; about £60 was my limit last time. I don’t play a lot of games but when I do, I’m usually disappointed to find that I have to turn off most of the fancy graphics. I’ve never been an ATI fan, so I was looking at the slightly cheaper Nvidia 7600GT models but, in the hope that it will last a bit longer, I’ve stretched the budget to £100. [$250]
• 2Gb DDR2 memory — I’ll make sure I get overclockable 800Mhz stuff, so it matches the FSB speed, but I don’t think I need to pay top whack for the premium branded stuff. [$265]
• A case — Undecided on this at the moment. I don’t want a huge thing, would prefer a small HTPC or cube style case. As long as it takes standard PSUs and full height PCI cards though. Possibly one of these, but I’ll see what they look like in the flesh first. [$130]

So, if you’re reading this Adrian/Andy/Rob/Jon etc - please let me know your thoughts on the above components. I need your expertise.

Feel free to recommend alternatives, but my budget is $1200 maximum. Hopefully I’ll be able to get the bits from MSY next weekend, unless I can source any of it cheaper elsewhere using the StaticIce website.

It’s been a while since I’ve written a techie post, but I’ve dabbled with several new gadgets over the past few weeks. Non-geeks can stop reading now.

We’ve now got a Media Centre PC hooked up to the TV in the lounge, perfect for watching all the UK television programmes and football that we’ve been downloading recently. I managed to find copy of “Windows XP to MCE05 convertor”, which worked a treat. Sara is bang up to date with all her UK soaps and, after finishing the latest series of The Sopranos, we’re now working our way through Prison Break and Deadwood, which we didn’t catch first time around.

All this downloading — about 150Gb this month — eats up a lot of disk space, so yesterday I decided to buy some external storage. I wanted something that could be accessed from either PC without having to mess about unplugging wires, like a small NAS box.

After a bit of research I found the Akasa Integral LAN enclosure, which sounded ideal at £50 in the U.K., but I couldn’t find an Australian supplier. After a bit more digging I found the NexStar “LANShare” (pictured above), which plugs directly into the ADSL router and, after installing NDAS drivers, appears as a local NTFS drive on both PCs.

The cheapest supplier in Melbourne that I could find was PC.Net.Au, who are based in a suburb called Elsternwick, about 30kms away. So we drove over and picked one up, taking the opportunity to look at Elsternwick, Elwood and some of Melbourne’s “posher” Bayside suburbs. They all look like nice places but, unfortunately, are a bit too pricey for us.

Then, on the way back, I called in at MSY to buy a big hard drive and picked up a cheap USB Skype phone at the same time. Hopefully Sara’s family will get sorted out with Skype phones/headsets soon.

I’ve also had a play with Phil’s “SlingBox“, which looks very interesting indeed. Initial tests look promising — I was able to watch U.K. Freeview — but it was a bit blocky and jerky. Hopefully that’s just a bandwidth/lag issue (my ISP is having a few issues with international latency at the moment). The technology looks great though, I’m really looking forward to watching live BBC or Sky News.

I’ve also had a chance to look at VMWare Server and set up a virtual Windows 2003 domain, just to keep my skills up to date for when I start applying for jobs. It’s an absolutely superb bit of software, far better than the Microsoft equivalent. I really wish I’d found it sooner, as it would have made MSI creation and testing a much easier task.

Finally I’ve installed the latest Windows Vista release candidate (on a virtual machine) and it looks really good. Although I wouldn’t want to be using a beta operating system on a daily basis, I’m getting used to the new look-and-feel by using the “Vista Transformation Pack” on top of Windows XP.

A few weeks ago I bought one of these things.

It’s basically a tiny freeview box which allows you watch Digital TV on a PC or laptop. I bought it so I could have Sky Sports News on in the background while I’m working or messing about the PC at home. Even though we don’t officially live in an area where you can get Freeview, I can still pick up over 40 channels with an indoor antenna.

The software that Freecom provide is pretty poor but I found that several other manufacturers sell exactly the same gadget bundled with their own software, so I’ve downloaded some different drivers which are much better.

In fact, the “Yakumo” drives that I’m using are “BDA” compatible which means I can even set up this gadget as a PVR using Windows XP Media Centre Edition or MythTV. I tried a few different packages before settling on the excellent GB-PVR.

Not bad at all for £32 and it will even continue to work when we get to Australia.

The MP3 player I bought myself back in November packed in a few weeks ago.

I returned it to Ebuyer who, in my opinion, have the worst customer service of any company I’ve ever dealt with. Eventually they gave me a refund so I bought one of these (except mine is a newer style case, much nicer and even smaller!).

I went for the 1Gb version, which is more than enough for most of my essential holiday listening. The built-in radio is better than the one on my old player, very handy when listening for final scores when walking back to the car after the match. The OLED screen is really nice and, with a bit of effort, can even play tiny movie files.

Edit: This one also packed in after a couple of weeks. Ebuyer have refunded me but I’ll wait for a couple of months before ordering a replacement - technology seems to improve all the time so I’ll see what my £60 will buy in October/November.

It’s been ages since I last treated myself, so I’ve bought myself a couple of gadgets today:

• A flash MP3 player to replace my broken CD walkman. About the size of a cigarette lighter, this can hold 512Mb of music - about 8-10 albums. It also has an FM radio (for the football results) and a voice recorder. Not bad for less than £50.
• A new DVD player which can play movies in DivX format. Although there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the expensive Pioneer player I bought a couple of years ago, I need something that will play odd file formats. Edit: Anyone want to buy a Pioneer DV-454-K in perfect condition? Leave a comment.