Hippoclides

Should we be assuming the OP owns one..? If he is renting privately, living on a boat may superficially seem to be much cheaper.

From what I've seen there seems to be much less variety in widebeams. Smaller boat builders don't tend to go for them so there are fewer unusual layouts or quirky interiors. There are a lot of full-fitted Liverpool boats on sale, nothing wrong with that, but they do tend to be pretty similar. The choice in interiors generally seems to boil down to how big the shell is and whether you want an extra cabin or not. But there are exceptions, Khan is one with its open-plan interior, and there are some trad sterns around but they're much less common than cruisers. Anyway, good luck with your search!

Hi Andy, Did you have "c/o" as part of your address? I've heard it sometimes helps to leave it off - then the bank is none the wiser that you're not living there. Admittedly, this might not be possible with business premises.

Hard to tell how boats get priced, I guess it's a compromise between what the owner wants for them and what the broker thinks they'll sell for. I think the owners of some more recent widebeam boats, bought as luxury liveaboards, are thinking of them like houses and expect to get back what they paid. It seems to take them a long time to accept this isn't going to happen and finally drop their prices. Generally the second-hand market is much weaker than it was before the recession and an old hand recently advised me to start by offering 30% less than asking price on any boat that took my fancy! That might be a bit extreme but I often see it mentioned on here that many go for 10-20% less than asking. Khan is quite unusual, I haven't seen very many widebeam "narrow boats" for sale that are that old, most seem to be five years or less. So either they only became common relatively recently, or a lot of recent buyers are regretting their decision and trying to sell their boat on. You might be able to bargain the price down a bit on the basis of age, particularly if a survey threw something up. The interior design is also a break from the norm, although I couldn't say that I like it myself. Nice floor, though. No idea about the relative quality of the enginges but the solar panels and wind turbine may have added something to the price. I've never bought a boat (yet) but have been looking at widebeams for sale for a while, so hope this is of more help than not!

I said the system tray was packed. That's the space on the bottom right hand side of the screen (although I've no idea if it's still there on Windows 7). Each icon there represents a program, running in the background, that took time to load at startup and is using memory and CPU cycles. I've noticed on many machines, particularly laptops, that it is often full of programs the owners have no real knowledge of and in many cases have no actual use for. It just seemed like a good idea when they installed it, or the computer came with them already installed. Windows is also designed (although maybe "evolved" is more accurate) rather differently than *nix OSes, like Ubuntu, and some of these differences, like having a centralised registry, make it very easy for 3rd party software to affect the running of the system when really they shouldn't be able to. Geeks have been saying for years that the designers should sort Windows out, sometimes very impolitely. However it's so complex that this is no small task, and almost certainly not a profitable one. It's much easier to pop some eye candy on and tell people to buy a faster computer Anyway, I'll bow out from this as I don't want to start an OS holy war (there are far too many on the web already!). For the record, I do use Windows but it, like all operating systems, requires some care and attention to keep it at its best.

I think that's pretty close to the truth of it. It's the installation of lots of software which is badly-written and/or unnecessary that does it. Without that (at least since Win2k, anyway) I've found they usually run pretty happily for years. Windows' strength is also its weakness; it makes it so easy to install software without a second thought that most people do. I've seen system trays so full of programs that they fill half the taskbar, and then the user complains about it being slow.

Living on a "leisure" mooring is something I may, by necessity, have to consider... Is toleration the general BW stance, or does it depend on the local moorings manager, etc? Is the status of moorings ever actively enforced, or is action usually only the result of complaints about non-official residents being made to the local council or BW? Is there even a legal definition of "residential" moorers, e.g. what happens if you cruise a lot and/or have an "official" address elsewhere (family or friends)? Apologies for all the questions - any answers gratefully received!

And continuous cruisers? <runs for cover>

How do people make narrowboats disappear? They don't exactly move fast and there's only so much canal they can cover in a given time, plus which people tend to remember them passing if they're in any way distinctive. Or is the danger organised thieves craning them out, repainting, and then dropping them back in somewhere else?