bluebobx

That Bosch hose might not be a complete loss though, as I know you can get convertors for it from eBay (and elsewhere). For example: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/like/170975380783 Downside is that obviously you'd need a machine end adapter, and another one to allow use of the tools, unless you've got some really good Bosch tools of course. I've just bought an adaptor to allow me to use the Karcher tools on my Titan - mainly because the Karcher brush looks good and is quite comfortable to hold. (Plus I'm mean enough not to want to throw out perfectly good tools just because the main unit was c**p).

Thanks - that's good to know.

+1 on the Nilfisk Titan, (bought one about an hour ago), and there's a thread elsewhere on this part of the forum on the pro's and con's of it v's the Karcher p/w's. Not sure if it'd help, but you might also want to try your local Homebase. I was in there (just before collecting the Titan from Argos) and they had the C110's on a darned good discount, not sure if it was £49.99 or £69.99 - but certainly less than the £99.99 that the Titan goes for. They also had pretty good deals on the Karcher K4 Compact... Looking for a replacement for a (hell sent) Karcher and it's fascinating to see the wide variety of opinions - Karcher's "Pro" gear seems to be pretty well respected, and one or two of the "consumer" ones (the really cheap ones) seem to have a following. But generally they don't have a good reputation otherwise ("built down to a price" being a common criticism).

Pabs, sorry for unzombie-ing this thread, but how did you get on with the NF Titan? After a lot of soul searching (and whining at the missus) I just bought one from Argos. So I'd obviously be keen to hear how you got on with it, especially as I'm planning to get CYC's snow foam nozzle - Madam's Roomie gets pretty "minging" so anything that means I spend less effort cleaning it is well worth the money! I'm not a newbie to power washers, having had a Karcher K3 model (bought from Homebase in a clearance deal). Unfortunately that POS never worked right from the day I bought it and died totally 8 months later (and Homebase wouldn't help with replacement, because I shoulda kept the box apparently). Although the self-same Homebase has some pretty good deals on Karchers, that experience put me off, so Nilfisk was pretty much the obvious choice. Just bought an adapter from eBay, so at least I can use some of the old Karcher tools when I send the K3 off to the council recycling.

Thanks for that - useful information to know. Is there some kind of capacitor or similar that needs refilled by the extra open/close time? Missus (who's car it is) took Garage B up on their offer, the service manager put the diagnostics on the car and - surprise, surprise found a blown fuse which they replaced then and there and gave a quick apology for the inconvenience caused. Car is now working as before, except the pull-off from rest is obviously better and a strange squeak that we sometimes got on gear changes is now a thing of the past. Think we'll be using Garage B again in the future. Solved.

I'd agree with that - the only time I see our Roomie "wet the concrete" is when it's cold out. Unlike my Chevvie - which seems to suffer from incontinence by comparison. PS there's very few "stupid questions" only stupid answers!

I'm hoping one of the Skoda-lock Holmes out there can shed some light on what I'm about to explain. Wife took her Roomie to Garage A (franchise dealer) for the usual annual service. When she came back she was pretty annoyed that she got the red cooling light up - and when she checked back she was told to "just top up the coolant tank with water" (and the level was about 1cm above the bottom of the tank when I checked :no: ). So a kettle of cool water went in. Oh and Garage A also managed to leave her with a duff headlight bulb - despite us asking for it to be replaced, and them charging us for the replacement part, fitting and testing. Suitably discouraged she then decided to take el Roomie to Garage B (Bosch service franchise specialising in VAG brands) for the replacement clutch that Garage A insisted needed done. Coincidentally I'd been moaning about the clutch slipping for a while, so I was happy to see it done. Anyway, job got done, and cheaper than Garage A was charging by a good margin. I drove the car back from Garage A, noticing that the "one-shot" on the windows wasn't working. Being a warm day :sun: , I turned on the air con only to be greeted with a furnace blast of heat. Then I noticed that the air-con button wasn't lighting either. So I tried the temp control which seem to give me either hot or "Florida hot" . Missus - now very p'd off - phones Garage A to get them to look at it, (since they were the last ones messing with the electrics), only to be told (not very politely) that A's service department would insist on "at least £80" to even look at it. On the other hand when we approached Garage B we were told that it was very unlikely that changing the clutch would screw up windows, aircon and heating, but if we could bring the car down then they'd take a quick look in case it was a blown fuse or a connection come adrift. Anyone got any ideas what's gone wrong? (PS what the heck happened to the "class leading" customer care that JD Power etc assign to Skoda - not impressed with the dealer at all - had better service from the Ford garage I used to use for my car). (PPS Missus - who really likes her Roomie - is now thinking of defecting to Renault because of the inept treatment she's received)

The little strap that you use to close the boot on a Roomie snapped off in my wife's hand the other day. Did a quick check of the scrappies (online) and couldn't see anything helpful, Anyone know were I can get a replacement? I'd normally ask the local Skoda dealer, but our one just changed to one of those chain ones that's more interested in selling new cars than looking after the old gear.

I used to use the same username and one of a selection of about six passwords, but since all the hacks a couple of years ago I got a password manager and started migrating my passwords to use different ones. A change of job meant that I ended up with a shedload more passwords - in which case a password safe became a necessity. There's actually quite a few good ones available, some with a hardware component too. Things to look for are strong encryption on the data (obviously!), ideally coupled with some kind of self-destruct if someone tries to guess the password. Norton (and the McAfee equivalent) don't get high marks in the reviews I've seen, but Roboform, LastPass and KeyPass all seem to do well. Heck, I know someone who uses a plain text file stored on a TrueCrypt container on a USB key. Seems longwinded to me - but he claims that TrueCrypt can have some really nasty encryption (even two factor) and he only needs to plug in the drive and mount it to be able to use his passwords. At home I'm using something called B-Folders, it's not strictly a password safe (it can store other stuff too), but it works very, very well with the combination of Windows, Linux and Android devices that I've got - with the ability to sync the data between two devices. Killer feature of that though is that you can right-click on the (obfuscated) password and it'll copy it into the paste buffer, so a quick Control-V and the password's in - all without revealing it to any sneaky shoulder surfer. Oh, and it'll also auto-generate (strong) passwords for you if you can't be bothered, e.g. "L+M$W7XLTq" Failing that there's stuff like myIDkey and YubiKey. The former is, or rather was, a Kickstarter project and I'd signed on as a Platinum supporter so I've got two of those on order at a special price.

I did say that Thunderbird worked fine for me, although the fact that Mozilla have stopped actively supporting it (because they want to do that damned stupid phone OS instead) is a bit of a pain. Hadn't come across Host Papa before, might be worth looking at when domain renewals come up! At the moment I'm using 1&1 and they've been pretty solid - only downside is that they usual the annual renewals as an opportunity to do upsells on opt-out. Then again FastHosts and Rackspace I've heard good comments about. Problem is that ActiveSync does more than just mail, and it's a proprietary protocol - although granted one with wide support. IMAP on the other hand is an open standard, so you're not at the whim of any protocol owner, and it's fully supported on just about any desktop/mobile OS. So if the OP doesn't need shared task and calendar (and you can easily do the latter via a free account like GMail), then IMAP will definitely be a more flexible solution imho. On the other hand if shared calendar and/or tasks is nice to have then there's some pretty decent deals available on Exchange hosting - funnily enough all around the £7/month mark.

Funnily enough my wife agrees with you (it's her Roomster, I'm still driving a Ford!). She bought her used Roomster from AC Seafield, but since she bought one of those AC "Service Plans" it gets serviced at the local AC complex, which happens to be Honda, (nothing against Seafield, just too far to drive to and fro for service). Not much in the way of complaints about that (Honda) dealer - apart from they managed to screw up the EGR sensor by giving the old Roomie a fuel treatment. At least they did sort that out (multiple visits needed) free of charge. Car also gets valeted when we collected it, and the Honda dudes will even collect it for you if needs be. Not sure though that I'll be letting them near my Skoda when I get it next year. :p

Hotmail/Outlook is definitely POP3/SMTP only - which imho in these days is a complete crock. Phone mail clients I can't comment on - I was pretty happy with the Hotmail client on Android, but when they MUI'd it to make the Outlook client I really wasn't happy. General email clients are easily findable, but K9Mail seems to get some love in a lot of places. KBPhoto: I've been a longtime Thunderbird user (with Hotmail) and it works fine for me - both on Windows (yuk) and Linux. I use Linux most of the time as my desktop (Windows is my gaming PC) so Outlook is a non starter. Plus I got Outlook as my work/office email client so after seven hours of that crap I really don't want to see it on my own PC. My copies of Thunderbird are running the WebMail and WebMail-Hotmail add-ons and once it's configured it seems to work fine for me. To be honest I had some bad experiences with "free" mail systems - with some of them (cough, cough, Yahoo) seeming to have an awful lot of spam turning up within a few days of registration. So I ended up buying a domain hosting package, which coincidentally gave me 1000 email addresses I can use. That's probably overkill for most people but if you check online you'll find a lot of ISP's offering email-only services, typically for less than £40 a year for multiple email addresses. Not that I'm necessarily giving it a recommendation, but according to the bumf I got from my ISP, they do a mail hosting package that gives you 5 distinct accounts with 150 aliases and 2GB of mail space for about 70p a month - very affordable in my book. Great thing about this is that it's IMAP, so you have a shared mailbox that you can use from any client. e.g. I can read a mail on my phone, compose a reply on my linux pc, and then move that message to archive on my windows pc - and all three mail clients will see the changes. I'm now in the process of moving my Hotmail messages - once read - to my IMAP'd space, (assuming that I don't want to delete them of course). IMAP space is definitely the way to go - shared mailbox accessible by what means you want to use - desktop email client, mobile email client, or even web browser. Email aliases are good too - means you can generate ones for systems where you think you'll be spammed and if it gets too much just delete the alias, (which is effectively the same as the email address being discontinued). Only thing I will say though - based on what I've heard from friends etc - is avoid GoDaddy. I've heard too many tales of bad service to be comfortable giving them any business.

Actually, the AA app for Android has a Fuel Price feature - it tries to show the cheapest five stations within a five mile radius of either your current location or a specified one. Plus the usual stuff like member special offers etc - like the Shell club app. Not liking the Google Maps app much these days - too many mistakes and it doesn't work so well in deepest Yorkshire or Scottish Borders (no data signal). Instead I've been using ALK CoPilot for my sat nav for a while - that stores its maps locally. Not strictly motoring app, but Convertor Pro is a good "how many X in Y" type app, although some of the conversions are just plain strange. E.g. according to it a petrol car getting 34.6mpg will generate 189.5 g/km of CO2 - that confused me.

Try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzM_8sfbPUo for the official UK advert, and here's the launch video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGt3Z8NPSV0 Looking at these, two things struck me. First being, is it just me or is the driver of the "Combi" in the launch video pushing his car a bit more than the "normal" vRS? Second thing is that Ade VRS is maybe right and there IS a bit of Audiness creeping in. Not that I mind, since I thought that the RS4 Avant is/was a good looking car. If the lottery numbers come up at the weekend, then my friendly neighbourhood Skoda dealer's going to get a visit, (a guy can dream...)

Couldn't find that post, but if Skoda want to "borrow" stuff from Ford then they can start with the suspension from the Mk 1 Focus Estate - only car I've found that handles better (i.e. hooligan time) with a load of holiday luggage or an Ikea cupboard flatpack in the boot. Agree about the new vRS estate - very, very tasty. Then again, I'll be looking for a new (to me - second hand) car to replace my raddled old Focus next year and saw a blue current shape vRS hatch in Skipton. Even SWMBO agreed that it was a "looker", so I'll probably be on the lookout for one of those next year. Figure with folks trading in for this new model there should be some decent ones of the current model on offer - but decision then becomes hatch or estate. Going to be diesel and manual (hate automatics - especially for a "sporty" car). Find it amusing that (according to AutoExpress) the "lesser" Octy vRS is actually a wee bitty faster than the Golf GTI.