My blog

Well I've had my Sagem 7280T for a few weeks now and I guess it's staying. It's not done anything really terrible and so I'll live with it. The temperature controlled fan is a lot quieter that I expected and it's not been on all that often, even with the high temperatures we had here in the last few weeks. The persistent ticking from the hard disk itself is no louder than a clock and I can certainly live with that.

That's not to say that it functions perfectly. It has a few niggles and I'll outline them here so you can be aware of them.

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I finally joined the digital revolution. We bought a Sagem PVR 7280T twin tuner 80Gb HDD recorder.

There's very few people have anything nice to say about this model, except that it's very cheap, but so far it's not given us any grief. The manual is shocking, and the addenda that came in the box is a classic of Engrish except that I'm sure it was translated from something european.

Anyway I'll give it two weeks, and if it doesn't screw up too badly in that time, I'll keep it.

The last two days I've been having trouble browsing the internet. My browser kept trying to connect to a mysterious 0.1.0.5 host.

Well that's obviously rubbish but I eventually tracked it down to a mysterious 3rd NIC that I seemed to have acquired as part of a Video Capture card installation.

No problem I thought, I'll just disable it and everything will be fine. But oh no, I can't disable that device, maybe it's not plug and play, or maybe a different user started it. That's ridiculous.

Eventually I got round it by giving the device a stupidly high metric, but what on earth is the point of such a device in the first place.

I have a lot of things to do with my hobby IT, and we've got to figure out the right order to do things, and how future-proof our decisions seem to be.

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I managed to get a look at an LG running with the same analogue feed as the other TVs in the store, and I have to say that it blew me away. Obviously you need to look at an LCD TV at the kind of distance that you intend viewing it from, but since I sometimes use our TV for console gaming, that distance can vary quite a bit. Even right up close the LG picture was sharp, bright and clear. There was very little bleeding and most impressive there was almost none of the "sparkle" that usually pervades LCD analogue images.

I'll go back and have another look sometime, but from the first viewing, it stood head and shoulders above any other LCD that I've looked at.