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A strange thing happened a couple of years ago. I'd just put this accelerator right and the radiographers called for the next patient. There was no immediate reply so they called again. At this point somebody else in the queue piped up "She's just popped out for some cigarettes." It would...

Back to the original problem -- I always get suspicious when I hear the words "power flush". Ellie 1997, did your downstairs radiators gradually fail or did it happen overnight? Let's assume the latter. Upstairs radiators can get hot on gravity flow alone but downstairs ones need a pump...

Go for the smallest storage cylinder you can find and lag it well. It will hold its heat all day. Put the immersion heater on a timer if you like so that the water is at its hottest just when you want it. Your linen cupboard will become a fully fledged airing cupboard from which you can get a...

I don't think there's anything odd going on with your dimmer. The circuit inside a dimmer is often a simple RC filter (with variable R) to delay the arrival of the trigger voltage at the triac gate. These things are made as cheap as possible so precision components are out. The poor...

It sounds like you have a restriction in the flow somewhere. It might be limited to the shower or affect the whole house. Is there a stop valve for the shower and, if so, has somebody been fiddling with it? Do you find that the flow rate from mains fed taps drops off when you turn on too many...

Are those halogen bulbs you've got in there? Halogens do not really like being dimmed. The envelope has to be very hot so that the halide can remove the tungsten and return it to the filament. The filament is of course b****y hot and the tungsten halide breaks down redepositing the tungsten...

Thanks Woodyoulike for restoring some intelligent debate to this thread! I heard about this five layer pyramid concept once before but never bothered to find out exactly what the layers were. You're right but I would add one extra detail; not all pyramids are equal. You don't have to be...

There is obviously a natural tendency in homo sapiens to work too hard gathering far more wealth than he can ever use. Some call it the protestant work ethic but somehow I don't see what anybody's religion has got to do with it. I bet it goes back to a time when food was hard to come by. If...

What version of Internet Explorer has that computer got. You need version 6 for the latest MSN Messenger. IE6 is free from Microsoft but if you're on PAYG be prepared for a whopping phone bill!

If the pipe is in use any contamination, eg plasticizer, oozing out of the pipe walls is continually washed away and out of your taps - and you drink it! Or maybe they're worried about what might have crawled into an open end. You can expect a fair amount of insect life to have taken up...

This slimming down exercise will not be a trivial one. There'll have to be a whole new civil service department set up to deal with it --- I agree that we have too many civil servants doing too many unnecessary jobs. I saw a small scale version of this kind of job two decades back when I...

First law of thermodynamics; energy cannot be created or destroyed. (We'll ignore the finer points of mass-energy conversion for now.) A kilowatt hour is a kilowatt hour. The only difference that can exist between different electric underfloor heating systems is the percentage of heat that...

Is the network cable twisted pair (looks like telephone cable) or ethernet (looks like rather thin TV coax). If it's twisted pair - and it nearly always is these days - you'll need a network hub ir router like the others have been saying. Ethernet is easily extended with some extra coax and a...

Have a look on the Advanced tab of your Internet Options (under Tools). In the Multimedia section there is an option to display pictures or not. If the tick box is empty you will see only blank boxes with a small symbol in the corner. Another possibility is that some security software is...

If the file transfer is a one-off task perhaps you can use Direct Cable Connection. This is one of the Windows 9X components (look under communications in Add/Remove programs). I'm not sure whether it still exists in 2000/XP.

I remember something called the "statutory walking distance for schoolchildren". If you lived more than three miles from the school you got your bus fairs paid. THREE MILES!!! Come on you money grubbing s**ts. I can still remember my disbelief at this and asking how many politicians would be...

I'm really, really pleased that MJ was cleared. Why? Because I don't think he intended to do anything bad. I'm no expert on English law, still less on US law, but I do know that a lot of it is about proving intent. Did MJ allow children to share his bed? Quite possibly. Did he do so with...

Bathjobby is perhaps being a little overcautious here though caution doesn't hurt when working inside electronic equipment. The good news is that most PCs are very safe as all the nasty voltages are wrapped up in a metal box. The mains lead plugs straight into the back of this box and...

I suppose you've already tried scrubbing but without success. My next line of attack would be meths but I wouldn't be too hopeful. The chances are that the dye has eaten its way into the surface of the vinyl. This calls for more drastic action in the form of acetone. Go carefully because...

Both the old PCs in which the modem worked had a mixture of ISA and PCI slots. One of them was an old Vectra 486. The mechanical construction of the two Vectras is very similar with all slots on a daughter board. The BIOSes are very different. The old 486 BIOS listed four specific IRQs...