Thank you Virgin Media

I enjoy 100Mbps super-fast cable broadband from Virgin Media! I live right on the edge of the cabled area. All the hundreds of houses further out suffer with slow ADSL (1 to 3Mbps) unreliable broadband. For just £42 per month I have great broadband with unlimited downloads, HD television and a TiVo box to record and catch-up on hundreds of channels, plus a telephone including line rental. Also brilliant customer service.

I've been a cable customer since we bought this new house and subscribed to cable from the very beginning about 15 years ago. Unfortunately it didn't get off to a great start as the house builders had installed the cable in the street incorrectly, but when that was fixed it has been full speed ahead since then including three company takeovers (Comtel -> NTL -> Virgin Media -> Liberty). Occasionally the cable does drop out typically at 10am and is restored by 4pm. I assume that they are doing maintenance. I do however have a 3 mobile broadband dongle for these times plus for when I travel.

A very satisfied Virgin Media customer.

Finally bought my first DSLR

After many years of consideration, I've finally been tempted by the low price of £279 for a Nikon D3200 DSLR with 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II telephoto zoom lens. I've owned a couple of 35mm SLRs in the past and understand the basics of photography.

My goal is to get out of the point-and-shoot rut of the last few years. I can't imagine that I will be using Manual mode initially, though I remember using a hand held light meter in the old days! Also I've got to get into the idea of variable ISO and post processing RAW images in order to get the best from the photos that I take. I must admit though the first few photos that I've taken in Auto mode and fine JPEG format have come out remarkably well.

In praise of Chromecast

We recently upgraded our main living room TV to a Sony Bravia Smart TV. The old Toshiba Regza migrated upstairs to my computer workshop and replaced a really old fish-bowl CRT television which was mainly used for me to watch football. To take better advantage of the new HD widescreen, I added a Google Chromecast stick making it effectively a Smart TV controlled from computer, tablet or phone.

What a revelation. Anything that I watched on the PC monitor can now be cast, or streamed to the wall-mounted widescreen. It integrates really well with the Google Chrome browser and is relatively inexpensive (£30) for a brilliant gadget. It also included a neat mains USB charger for those older TVs that don't have a USB socket like mine. I can now catch-up on missed programs (in HD quality) for the BBC channels and will soon be able to do the same for ITV, Channel 4, etc.

Wonderful WiFi

I've just realised the impact that WiFi has had on a normal domestic environment. Just by listing the devices that are regularly connected to it and hence my 100mbps Virgin media cable broadband connection.

• Two laptops and three desktops
• One Smart TV and one Chromecast TV
• One Nexus 7 tablet
• One HTC smartphone
• One Sonos bridge and speakers
• And for completeness, via Gigabit Ethernet, one desktop, one Home Server and one NAS box

As yet, no wireless printers, photo cameras or CCTV cameras, etc.  Still not bad for one house.

Enjoying Far Cry 4

My son, Nicholas gave me the Far Cry 4 game for Christmas and I'm enjoying it immensely. As with the other Far Cry games, you wander about a huge area performing quests and discovering people, treasure and culture.

It is a wonderfully graphic game with plenty of attention to the details. The wildlife is amazing and frequently dangerous. The quests can mostly be done stealth-fully or aggressively. You can explore and conquer areas at will. The fast travel system and buzzers cut down on the boring bits, yet enemies trying to retake already captured outposts keeping you on your toes.

For example, I just managed to capture the very hard Varshakot fortress by first sniping the enemy snipers on top of the walls. Then finding a secret passage that takes you into the fortress and a quiet spot to hide up until the uproar dies down. Secondly, blowing the main gates with explosive and calling your support troops to help. This draws the enemy including the heavy infantry to move to the area under attack and then mortar it killing them all. This just leaves an enemy helicopter to deal with using an RPG and a lone soldier to dispatch quickly. Job done and fortress secured. A great game!

nVidia GT730 revisited

Following my recent post extolling the virtues of the nVidia GT730 graphics card as my new entry-level choice, I wanted to try the card with GDDR5 memory and a 128-bit memory bus. The 1Gb DDR3 version with 64-bit memory bandwidth cost at the time £34, but this has since risen to well over £40 and even £50 in some cases. The GT740 model with GDDR5 and the 128-bit memory bandwidth are £80 or so which is dangerously close to the GT750 with Maxwell architecture offering much better performance. So, when I saw a Gigabyte GT730 with 2Gb of GDDR5 memory albeit with a 64-bit bus for just over £50 it seemed worthwhile to test and see if the extra capacity and faster memory makes much difference.

The benchmarks show at least 36% improvement which for an extra £10 seems worthwhile. The Gigabyte model also comes with a relatively large (10cm) cooling fan which should aid any over-clocking that you might want to apply to gain even greater performance improvement. Also with 2Gb texture memory modern games will run better. So, my entry-level choice has moved slightly to the nVidia GT730 with 2Gb GDDR5.

Testing Windows 10

I'm testing Microsoft's latest Windows 10 version and getting really good impressions from it. It appears to be combining some of the best features of the highly successful Windows 7 version together with the total disaster of Windows 8 in a consistent and modern approach. Gone is the weird Start menu, (unless you want it) and the Charms side menu. It is much easier to find apps and files now.

I'm running Windows 10 Technical Preview via the Insider program on an old DELL Optiplex GX520 with Intel Pentium D dual core at 3GHz and just 2Gb of DDR2 memory. Even on this low-end specification it runs reasonably responsive. I've yet to try any really demanding applications or games.

There are many new features though Cortana the speaking personal assistant is not available in the UK yet. Quite a number of the new apps are just place-holders requiring further development but even these add an integrated vision of what is to come. It appears that Microsoft has learnt its lesson from Windows 8 and the really good news is that it will be free to upgrade to Windows 10 for a year when it is released later this year. With this generous offer in place and from what I have seen so far, I'm a firm supporter of Windows 10.