Clutter? From other Freeview channels or something else? Just trying to fathom if I can get around this somehow... the next England game appears to be ITV only... bugger.

For motherboards, I've been impressed with my ABIT AV8-3rd eye (always used Gigabyte and ASUS before that) - you get a little LCD screen that plugs into the motherboard via a usb type cable (though it's not usb) and shows things like CPU temperature, voltages, system temp etc... and if you're in to overclocking, the bios is very helpful in letting you do that. I've got 2 black gold pci freeview cards in there for use with media centre and the nebula digitv pci for use as a radio and this HD trial etc..

I've just upgraded from an Athlon 3400+ to an Athlon X2 4200+ - this thing flies (£200 from ebuyer.com)! And is more than fast enough to let me use coreavc 1.1 to do the h.264 decoding in software (it appears to utilise both CPU cores on the Athlon).