Well, I couldn't figure out where is best to put this, so this forum seemd the logical place.

The internet.


The problem I am having is that I only reccently joined the broadband revolution, and as such I only have a few websites I head to regularly, mainly forums to do with my car, and/or personal contacts. Obv we all have our fav shopping sites that we keep a weather eye on for bargins, and most people can while away hours in blissless bordem, scrolling tru the utter rubbish that is offered to the highest bidder on the electronic bay.
essentially, I am looking for some sweet sites/programs to get familure with (no not like that, I already know thoese ones :> ) I want to get using the 2MB connection I have to its full extent. Forums are good, but slow, online gaming is good, but not the experiance I remember it as. I think that is a seperate issue....mainly an issue of me picking a game to brush up on before trying to find some recreational clan. Back to the issue at hand...what sites/programs do you guys reccomend to extend my use of the w.w.w? I have next to nothing installed on the machine, save AVG and ZoneAlarm, and use no downloading apps. In my olden days, I was a user of the free napstar and made use of wirelplay. I really just want to strech my pc, and the internet seems to be the place to do that...

Any ideas welcome!

start expanding your music and film collection!!


legitimatly of course

ummm...theres lots we could all suggest i guess, what would proberly be easier is, if you say what you would like to get from the internet or your pc and we can narrow it down, instead of just realing off lots of proberly uninteresting things to you.

I mean...you can *cough* download stuff to watch or use or listen to

or downloading things to change the appearance of your windows


you can get stuff to tell the fan speeds or memory/cpu usage etc...

stuff like that

sorry, yes I should be more specific. (edit: which is hard seeing as I dont have a specific end in mind. )


well I would be interested in expanding my music collection, movies I rather leave to the true experiance of cinema, like the advert says, its the experiance that counts! however music is a bit hit or miss, so i would like to look into that, but I dont have an ipod, and dont really want one...maybe a mysterious pm might stumble into my inbox offering some interesting site/app. maybe.

As for what I am looking for web wise. Well I what apps are standard fair for the people on this board? I will be trying o/cing prob tonite in front of big brother. I would very much like to get into some web pottering, mainly doign basic stuff on my *legitimate* copy of macromedia suit. But I would like to know what good sites offer good games/hardware reviews. IGN is the one I see the most, is there any others?

tucows was an old fav, is that still a good site for downloading guff?

Gaming is really where I want to get too I think, i have been told of xfire, and once home Ill have a look. I really am just looking for a place to be able to have the odd game of team deathmatch or capture the flag with people I know from a forum etc. Nothing serious, as I dont have the time, but something simliar to a 5-a-side kick about of a tuesday evening type thing.

If you want to expand your horizons regarding music I recommend Pandora.

If you're interested in online RTS games then I recommend the open source game Spring.

if you want a good online game thats also not too heavy on the old PC system (altho your system can run it at high fine)

I would suggest AA (Americas Army)

That is a TRUE team based game,

http://www.americasarmy.com

sppoky! stumbling over this site is what prompted the original post! Its things like that I was looking for, the misc uses for the net. I know full well it can be used for email, images, forums, grott, buying/selling, but its all the unclassifed/unclassifiable stuff that I was looking for, useful sites that are good to bookmark.

:>

Thanks for the gaming link, I will go check it out once I am home (still at work)

http://www.purevolume.com is worth a look as well

Although quite genre specific

Gaming wise, counterstrike source, which is bundled with Halflife2 i believe is a quick team based game, well in an ideal world, where each round only last a few mins usually so that might fit the bill. Alot of people do take it quite seriously though but add a few people from here to your xfire account and you can see what and where they are playing (assuming its an online game) and you can join their server if you have the game and its not already full.

as for music well personally i tend to buy cds and rip them to my pc or i get the odd track squirted to me, usually via xfire again

Thanks for all the feedback guys! Last night was a wash out...so ill need to have a look at all things suggested