Welliesorter

Wales, like the rest of Britain, has had its local government mucked about with rather a lot in the past 30 years. Britain has a hotch potch of different structures in different areas. The historic counties often bear no relation to the structure of local government. To use an example from England, Leicester is not the administrative centre of Leicestershire and the city and county have separate councils. Rutland used to be a separate county, then it was swallowed up by Leicestershire, now it's a county again but it shares police and fire services with Leicestershire. The situation in Wales is just as confusing but you should find the info you need here, here and especially here . Wales also has a national assembly (with fewer powers than the Scottish Parliament) with a web site here.

Thanks all, especially to Martin for posting the piccies. I'll see if mine can be persuaded to fit in the same way.

Thanks for both replies. I'm not sure that the surround for my radio would hold the adaptor in. As I said, the radio came with a plastic surround of its own. This clips onto the cage but not very firmly. It's held in place by the bigger surround thingy. The attached shows both surrounds without the radio front. Now that you've planted the idea that it might not be fitted correctly, I'll take a closer look later.

What do people here use to hold bits of dashboard trim in place? My radio is surrounded by the adaptor that fills the gap left behind by the bigger Skoda radio and another bit of plastic that came with the Sony unit I have now. When my old boss fitted it for me last year he used some blobs of silicon filler to hold the plastic bits in place. The idea was that they'd be easy to remove if I ever wanted to put the original back when selling the car. The silicon filler dried to form a kind of clear plasticky stuff and held for about a year. Since then I've resorted to using Blu-Tack but this is less than ideal because it gets soft and stringy when it warms up. It's also embarrassing to have people's ideas about Skodas confirmed by having bits fall of the dashboard at regular intervals.

Useful article on SP2 security here. It looks as if the firewall isn't really that much of an improvement on the original. I've reverted to using ZoneAlarm. Not sure I agree with what the article says about the DHCP client. I wouldn't be able to connect to my cable modem without it.

It only turns on the firewall by default if you don't already have an active firewall. Presumably this is because Microsoft could be accused of being anti-competitive by making other software firewalls appear to be redundant. Zonelabs claim that the Windows firewall on its own isn't enough. Although they have a vested interest, I'm inclined to believe them.

After seeing the price of cupholders, I think it might be cheaper to employ someone to do exactly that. What's the minimum wage again?

I can't believe Firefox gives problems with 1GB or RAM. I've been using it on 384MB under Windows XP since the early days of Firebird. The Linux version is just as good. If easily amused, there's an extension that renames the browser every time you run it. I'm posting this using Mozilla Supersnake.

In case what you've read here makes you feel you have an inferior engine, take a look at this thread on the Honest John site. In particular this post near the end. "When VW were looking to buy Skoda one of the tests they did was to put this much maligned push rod engine on the test bench and tried to break it. They tried everything they knew and went beyond the point where they knew one of their own engines would have given up the ghost long before. The Skoda engine still ran and all they managed to do was create a chip on the bottom of one of the piston skirts. In the old phrase "they liked the product so much they bought the company" I've no complaints about my 8v 1.4 after 7000 miles. I knew what I was buying but when I bought mine the Silverline was a brilliant package for the money. Why would anyone want heated seats? Don't all cars have heaters nowadays? You wouldn't have a heated sofa in your house.

A lot of the threats identified by these programs are tracking cookies, which aren't quiet as scary as the rest. On the other hand, a lot of people under-estimate the danger of spyware. If you want to be very afraid, read this article. It makes a good case for not using the dreaded Internet Explorer.

Did you need any special equipment? Are they self-adhesive or do you need a heat gun?

I downloaded and installed it on my free-standing home PC a couple of days ago. No obvious ill effects yet. It was 266 MB though. If you got yours from an unofficial source you might want to check that it's genuine first! See this article at Neowin.net to help you make your mind up.

Leicestershire Police have been using Fabias for a while. I've seen several in Leicester city centre, all marked with something like 'Community Safety'. They can't be vrs because they've had them for at least a year.

My digital camera is an ancient Kodak 1.3 MP jobbie that cost me about £180 at the beginning of 2002. Technology and prices have changed somewhat since then so I can't offer much advice on choice of camera. One good site for finding the best deals is at http://www.users.totalise.co.uk/~lauriem/digital_cameras.html. My top digital photography tips: If you haven't already got a CD writer, get one. They're ridiculously cheap now. One day you'll zap your hard drive by mistake. I did this for the first time last year and ended up spending £50 on data recovery software. Stupidly, I hadn't backed up my files for a very long time. You can do some nice tricks with a CD writer: Nero enables you to create video CDs which you can play back in a domestic DVD player. Such a CD pauses after every frame, enabling your DVD player to act like an old-fashioned slide projector. If you have a recent DVD player, this may not be necessary as many will let you view jpegs on a CDR anyway. For some reason, the cheaper the DVD player the more features it's likely to have. Avoid using flash if possible. A digital camera will work well in a wider range of conditions than a conventional one and flash is often unnecessary. Get hold of Irfanview from www.irfanview.com. This is an unbelievably good little program that will view, crop, lighten and darken, create slideshows and screensavers, convert file formats and do more things than I can possibly think of. It really is one of the best freebies you can get. If you use software to edit your photos in any way at all, keep the originals. It's likely that you'll be saving as jpegs and this uses lossy compression. This means that every time you save a file there'll be a deterioration in quality. This is a bit like making photocopies of photocopies or converting between mp3 and wma or ogg. Keeping the original file enables you to go back to that instead of working on an already compressed copy. Don't attempt to print your own pictures. You'll never do it as well or as cheaply as Bonusprint.com, or one of the other on-line printers, who charge 15p for a standard sized print. You download their software and upload your pictures to them. I've used them twice and my photos arrived within a couple of days. The resulting prints would be easy to mistake for 35mm. If you want to show people your pictures on line, Yahoo! Photos is good but not as good as it used to be. At one time you could share full-sized photos but now only the owner gets access to the picture in its original form without handing over dosh. You get 30 MB to play with but if you run out of space, there's nothing to prevent you creating another account. You can have private or public folders, or share them with named individuals. There's a better service at http://www.fotopic.net. This is more flexible and offers more storage space, but it's not quite as easy to use.

Am I alone in finding that site quite shocking? I know there are plenty of fake ID sites around but I haven't seen one that blatantly does fake licences and passports before. Some of the prices are pretty shocking too. Why would anyone want to pay

I have a silver Fabia without them. I think the car would look better with. It's qute a high waisted car so it breaks up the sides. I've been quoted between

Isn't that the Bentley that shares its designer (Dirk van Braekel) with the Fabia?

Don't forget, a phone of this age will be only single band. This particular one is 900 Mhz so it would only work on O2 or Vodafone. If O2, it wouldn't work as well as a modern dual or tri band phone because they use 1800 Mhz to fill in the gaps in some areas. On the other hand, Nokia batteries are easy to get hold of.

Part of the problem is that so much water seems to flow on the inside of the doors when the car is left standing in the rain. I find gallons of water (I exagerrate slightly) accumulates inside the front and rear doors and doesn't disperse until after I've opened them, often hours after it's stopped raining. As far as I can tell there's no water getting in past the door seals. It's more of a problem on the driver's side because the car is parked on the left at a slight tilt caused by the camber of the road. Presumably this accounts for the marks left on the outside sills where the water has flowed out from behind the doors. I've noticed these on quite a lot of Fabias, especially silver ones. Has anyone found a cure for this or is it a design feature we just have to live with?

Oddly enough no. I've been all over the country, from Land's End to the Scottish Highlands, with no FM reception problems at all.

I don't have the correct adaptors/boosters and I have lost LW/AM reception. I never listen to stations on these bands so I've never got round to fixing this. Funny how ancient threads sometimes get revived! I'm still happy with my Sony anyway, although next time maybe I'll buy somethign that doesn't have such a bright display. I like the look of the retro-Pioneer that a few people here have bought.

Do you mean full Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox? Firefox is a free-standing browser that's much smaller than full Mozilla. If you want a bigger Google toolbar, there's an add-on for Firefox that's very similar to the IE version but without the privacy issues (or at least there is for version 0.8). The download manager in Firefox is excellent and does give you the opportunity to launch the file you've downloaded.

If you don't like the look of it you can change it by going here. Which ones? The Flash blocker is a brilliant way of stopping annoying ads. Which ones? That's more likely to be the result of a lack of testing on the part of the page's designer than a fault with the browser. Many developers only bother to test on IE. If they follow correct web standards, the pages are more likely to work in Mozilla and its derivatives.

Or follow the link in my post above! NTL do give you the option of forwarding all your mail to an alternative address so one possible work round would be to send it all to a provider that does offer spam filtering. Yahoo! does this although you have to pay them if you want to download your mail to a POP3 client.

I had the same query almost a year ago. See this thread for the discussion and note Denis's words of caution. If you can't be bothered to wade through that, I topped mine up with Magnatec with no ill effects but I'm not entirely sure if it's officially approved for the purpose. I've only ever had to top it up a couple of times and the oil was changed recently at the first annual service.