Alrighty, so my girlfriend just got a 52 inch tv and a 320gb PS3. They also got one of those power board things where you can plug in like eight things to the one wall socket (Don't know what it's called) and it's got ports for ethernet and phone line. My question is, how/does it work, and if so, how does one make it work?
Well I can really only speak for the ethernet ports, but there will (most likely) be several ports. One of them (it probably will be marked) is where you plug in directly from the router to the strip. With the rest you can run an ethernet cable to another computer, game console, whatever. That's what I'm guessing at least, if that's true then it's a built in ethernet switch. I wouldn't recommend overloading it with devices, but a few is fine.
It's just a surge protector. It stops the PS3 getting damaged if there's a thunderstorm or something. You don't need to use the ethernet port or phone port, but you can choose to use them if you happen to have a phone/ethernet cable lying about. Personally, I wouldn't bother, as you'd need to have an extra phone/ethernet cable lying about. To use it, you plug the cable into the first device, then plug it into the socket on the surge protector. You then get the second cable and plug it into the second device, and plug the other end into the other part of the surge protector. But really, I wouldn't bother. It'll still work fine without it.