RE tread life. A, balance wear by changing fron to rear occaisionally- probably do twice in life of tyres. Keeps the whole cars tread more balanced.
b. Look for tyres with High 300+ treadwear index. I haver had less than 35k life on performance coupes (audi & honda). People argue that the index is only camparative within one make but My experience suggests otherwise.
Marangoni tyres have 400 index! hope this helps

Thanks Dizzy, I do about 80:20, motorway to town. Most of the motorway stuff is 70mph + sometimes prolonged *ahem* 85mph so I rarely drive it at optimal extra-urban, its either stop/start or 20 miles odd at 70. It's not driven too hard, I've very rarely had the engine up to 4000rpm, no point.

The oil is a darker brown, harder to tell now I've poured a litre of new stuff in there. :)

I think I'll get the oil changed though, should be just after Christmas at this rate.

Hi,

I have just been through exactly the same decision process although I did not have the Passat (expensive parts and service) on my list or anything French (too unreliable)! This week I bought a 97P Mondeo, 4 dr, 2 litre, petrol, manual, Ghia at auction. It has covered 107,000 miles, missed 2 services. I paid £1050 plus £110 buyers premium. I have done 500 miles in it this week. It is very quiet and relaxed at 80 on the motorway, handles miles better than my ex company V reg Passat TDi and on my first tankful has returned 34mpg. I looked at a few R and S Reg Mondeos from Autotrader in the £3,500 to £4,500 but they all had 60 to 80,000 miles so I considered it worth the *risk* for the potential saving. It was my 2nd visit as the previous week there was nothing at all there in my price bracket. There were lots of ex lease very good condition, fsh, 3 year old cars such as Vectras and Astras but they were going for around £5,000. Passats £2K more. A handful of 626, Avensis, Primeras fetching in between. Very few Mondeos and no Focii sub £4K. Then lower down the price scale in the General sale were lots of really tatty p/x cars with only a few in good condition. Very few turbo diesels, one S reg, very tired looking Citroen Xsara 90bhp, 97,000 miles went to £2,300 which seemed a lot. I chose the car after studying in detail all the excellent advice in the CBC breakdown and then followed the buying at auction advice. I?m sure if you do the same, you will end up with the right car at the right price. Good luck!

Beggar!

I'm uncovered.

Hi DL.

Life moves on, life stays the same

Daryld,

I have sympathy for you. As it happens there is the same situation at my work place. As an aside I wonder why your company is not using an internet filter, as we do, which stops unacceptable sites rather than retrospectively trying to penalise people for it.

I do hope that you manage to find another way to come back here, be that from home or internet cafe or something else.

Having said that, however, there is not much we can do. For a long time this site was losing money, at times quite substantially so. That was always a high risk place to be, and could have eventually meant the closure of the site.

When full control passed to HJ he put, and continues to put, a great deal of effort into obtaining advertising revenues and sponsorship deals. This is not a matter of HJ getting rich out of the site; if he was I\'d get more than a ploughmans and a pint of naff beer per year ! This is a case of HJ managing to keep the site going and paying for itself, rather than taking money from his pocket (which he would not be prepared to do more than he already does, and we can\'t really expect him to do).

We are lucky that HJ *wants* to maintain this site as much as he does, since the profit alone would be insufficient to motivate him, or at least it wouldn\'t be enough for me.

Therefore we have to have the advertisements, of all types. There are times when it gets annoying for me as well, but frankly not as annoying as not having the site would be. There are times when we have advertisments for sites such as e-bay, which some companies will not permit. Of course at other times the adverts are acceptable to all. I cannot tell you when will be which.

In my personal opinion pop-ups are probably a dying trend since most advertisers, at least the respectable ones that we use, are starting to see the inadequacies of them as a medium. I would be surprised if we continued to see them much into next year.

And the costs we are dealing with are not one-off costs, they are recurring monthly costs. So the site needs a constant revenue stream.

I realise that to you, that just means that the pop-ups will remain and that gives you issues at work; but I am trying to explain why it is that way.

In the end the advertising allows this site to remain and a lot of people to enjoy it.

Sorry for the way it impacts you.

if anyone wishes to e-mail Daryld and he wishes it, then e-mail me and I\'ll pass them through, assuming his e-mail address is not visible in his profile - I haven\'t checked.

Mark.

p.s. end of discussion;