Peter Sharpe

Could the third one be an Armstrong Sidley? It's a wonder they used to sell any of them if they painted them all in that green colour.

If they think that sticking Phil Collins in it will sell more copies, then they must be even more behind the times than I thought. My parents obviously felt obliged to send me to Sunday School, but were sensible enough to bow to common sense when it became apparent that I thought that a day spent hunting for stone loach with a tiddler net was far more spiritually enlightening.

This sums up the twisted morality of the self-righteous and indignant complainants: "9:20 PM HAS EVERYONE LOST THEIR MORALS? Says: ANYONE WHO THINKS THIS GIRL IS ANYTHING BUT HUMAN WASTE NEEDS TO BE ELIMINATED FROM SOCIETY. PROBLEM SOLVED." Obviously posted by a fine, upstanding member of society.

After a great deal of Googling I have solved the problem. When I checked via Control Panel | Add/Remove programs, Net Framework 1.1 SP1 seemed to be already installed, but it required a registry hack to make it work. Go to the Start menu, choose Run and type cmd From the cmd prompt, type %windir%\ehome\medctrro.exe /o /p RunOnce then Enter You will have to type the sequence in bold manually, because cut and paste doesn't work in that dialog. I don't know what it does but it works. I found all this from the following source: http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/200.../18/482472.aspx I hope this helps somebody else in the same situation.

It makes me wonder if it is a similar problem to that cause by XP Service Pack 3. If you are allowing automatic updates, SP3 tries to install, then fails after about 20 minutes and takes the same amount of time to uninstall itself, taking vital Media Centre files with it. System restore fails at every attempt to roll back to before the attempted SP3 installation and I can no longer use the TV tuner. If I hadn't switched off automatic updates, this would happen over and over again, every time I switched the computer on.

I managed it in the end, although the biggest problem turned out to be getting the side panel back on again. The problem wasn't with the computer at all, but with Microsoft's continual torrent of updates. I've given up trying to install Service Pack 3, but what I really needed was NET Framework 1.1 and the hotfix that they brought out to correct it (typical).

The fact that it refers to IE6 is a definite warning sign.

Mine continually failed at the same point and to make things worse, it then seemed to take forever to uninstall itself. I was advised to download the iso file that you can burn to a cd and use that method instead. The thing now is that after starting up the cd and seeing what is on it, I really can't see any reason whatsoever for doing it. I'll just tag this along as well, just to see if anybody has any ideas. XP MCE won''t work because it says I don't have a TV card, yet Device Manager says it is working perfectly. Apparently I need something called Net Framework, but how do I get it?

Your car radio doesn't need to have a bluetooth capability. I have a sat-nav that enables you to broadcast the voice instructions to any un-used FM channel. The only trouble is that it just isn't worth trying because all "unused" FM stations have far to much background hiss to make it worth doing.

Does cats' **** also taste better in Oz?

What, the dark side? I took all the outer screws out before but still couldn't get anything to move - unless I resorted to inserting a crowbar. Actually, without expecting too much, I sent an email to Medion support and the replies have come back extremely quickly and have been very helpful. Apparently, I only have to remove the screws on the left hand side and I should then be able to unclip a small plate in the bottom left hand corner. I didn't have the confidence to start messing around with it last time, but I will try again tonight. I have to say that I have been very impressed with Medion support, as you hear so many negative comments about PC manufacturers these days. I didn't have to wait on the phone for an hour for somebody in a foreign call centre to read a script to me, just a simple and very quick exchange of emails - brilliant.

Following a re-installation of Windows XP MCE, my computer can no longer see the TV card, causing Media Centre to crash as soon as it is switched on. The Medion technical support people suggested that I re-seat the card, but I'm damned if I can work out how to get inside the box. The last Medion PC I had was dead easy, but at a glance, this one looks as if it requires completely dismantling. I feel I must be missing a trick somewhere, so does anybody know how to do it?

There are times on the Trent, when fishing becomes almost impossible when a match has finished upstream, due to the amount of caster bags that come floating down.

If you prod the stones in the margins on the gravel in Collingham weir, you will see tiny little flatties shoot out, the size of postege stamps.

I've reached the stage where I don't feel confident with any bait unless it is hair rigged. In fact it feels incredibly strange to put a hook through a bait. How on earth did I ever used to catch fish on worms?

Some people will go to any lengths to get a good cleavage shot.

It's the amount of dissolved calcium.

Good for you and I wish more people followed your example. I visited a wood recently where there were quite incredible numbers of them on the ground. You literally could not walk five steps in some areas without coming across one. As we always say about angling's litter louts, the empty packiaging is always far lighter to take home than when it was carried to the waterside.

I've just watched this programme, in which a 20 pound pike was killed to be served up in a pub restaurant, thereby making all comments about Eastern Europeans killing for the pot seem immediately invalid. This was followed by the catching of a large number of crayfish in a trap, with no effort made to explain the differences between the signal crayfish and the native British species. To top it off, the same bloke went shooting woodpigeon, ceremonially ejecting his cartridges onto the ground as he walked off. This has always bugged me about shooters, who don't seem to regard spent cartridges for the unsightly litter that it is. I suppose the excuse is that many of them are farmers, who also don't seem to think that empty chemical drums count as litter either.

I can't be quite sure, but I think that is the pit that the one-time record tench came from. If not, it must be very close to it (or where it was). It is probably controlled by Hotpoint's own fishing club and ought to have some decent tench, perch and rudd in it, with just one or two big pike and many more small ones.

Totally agree with the above. I work on a magazine and we actively discourage people from sending photos in the RAW format. RAW just eats up your memory card space and unless you are such an expert that you know exactly what exposure and aperture settings to make for every exposure you will be restricted from experimenting. Apart from anything else, I have yet to see any difference whatsoever between an opened RAW file and a jpg taken straight after. You are far better shooting in the highest qhality jpg possible and bracketing the exposure (either manually or by the camera's automatic facility) to be certain of getting a usable shot. If you want to do your own processing on the finished shot (although most magazines prefer that you leave it to their own experts), then save a copy as a Tif file, so that any subsequent saving won't result in further compression. Every time you save a jpg it degrades it, although copying it and pasting it leaves it unaltered.

Has the government ever been known to do anything whatsoever as a result of one of these petitions?

I had one of the later versions of MS Office (probably not the very latest) installed on my PC at work recently. Why is it that software companies produce a perfectly good piece of software, then ruin it by bloating it with unwanted features that merely irritate. I can hardly think of any long standing software that wasn't far better three or four versions back.

This is supposed to work http://nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html

I discovered that huge numbers of people have had problems with Nero, but normally by creating DVDs with no sound. I then found out that Nero have a tool on their website that you can use to remove all traces of the program (something that the normal uninstaller fails to do). I then re-installed Nero from the computer's recovery CD and everything was fine. The only worry I have is that the system restore point I created after installing it no longer works. I had also been having trouble with Internet Explorer. After re-installing XP, I forgot that it put IE6 back on, which caused a problem of "Windows cannot find '(null)'" every time I tried a search. Re-installing IE7 cured that, but I'm still a bit worried about system restore not working properly. It was due to it hanging that I had to re-install XP.