Lots of overnight advice. Thanks folks.

Did you find out whether you could tone down (yes, pun intended, sadly) the noise from the base unit, MM?

My BT jobbie has all sorts of alternatives for the roving handset, but you can do nothing to humanise the base charging unit. I am sure it is to do with Brussels making it illegal not to know that you have an incoming call when you are sitting in/on the outside loo!

I even opened up the base with the intention of snipping the connectors to the warbler, but gave up as I could not guess what chip did what. Currently the base unit is sitting on a piece of foam rubber as my wife is fed up with jumping out of her skin each time this dreaded thing 'rings'. And it still frightens the cat next door!

Gosh this is boring compared with chat about demountable Raid arrays, but if you have the patience please keep the ideas coming.

TP

TP, snap, I snipped the connections to the speaker on my last phone :-)

K,

How did you know which was the speaker? I might as well do that as I'll never get any money back from the shop.

TP

? It's where the sound comes from :-) Normally under a grill or hole in the outer casing.

K.

Do they have a particular appearance? I seem to feel that when I opened up my casing I saw several 'chips' about the size of a camera CF card, but nothing that looked like a mini loudspeaker.

TP.

TP

Try putting blue tack into the hole where the sound comes out.

Docproc. I think you asked for a decision and action over Internet connection on Continent. I have settled for a T-Mobile data card (bought at 20 per month) Easy to connect and adequate for me in wandering around in Britain. Said that I can use zones in France , Spain and Portugal. Not sure yet.

Op,

Blue tack. Good idea. I'll try that first.

TP

Can anyone lighten my darkness?
My wife's pc has displayed the blue screen of death with the following detail:

STOP, 0X000000D4 (0XABB37F38, 0X0000001C, 0X00000001, 0X80502000)
rdbss.sys

It's an Packard Bell machine which has given her nothing but trouble - it runs on Windows Media, of which I am highly suspicious!

Splat

I doubt that it is caused by Windows Media Centre, I have a computer running on that and I reboot it 3 or 4 times a year.

There have been problems reported with rdbss.sys so you should make sure that you have all MS updates installed. Also run chkdsk incase it is hard disk related and run a full virus scan.

Thanks Optimist - will try all these things.

Incidentally, what is rdbss.sys?

Splat, I found this:
This is an know issue with MS. Solution provided see support.microsoft.com

Splat

The short answer is that it is one of the windows system files. If you want further details, try Googling it.

TP:

Did you find out whether you could tone down (yes, pun intended, sadly) the noise from the base unit, MM?

As promised, I went home and read the instruction manual (there's a first)!

On the Panasonic phone I have, you can control the volume of the base unit warble, even mute it, but you can't select a different tone (unlike the handsets). My phones are about two years old and cost about 180, looks like you can buy them by the gross (well, a four handset system) for about 100 these days. I don't doubt that the spec has improved as well.

MM,

"you can control the volume of the base unit warble, even mute it, but you can't select a different tone (unlike the handsets). "

Well that's progress.

I'll start looking at the alternatives.

Thanks,

TP

True, I'd forgotten that my Panasonic phone base unit is the same. In fact I have it on mute with the phones themselves on music.

Thanks folks for all the phone suggestions.

I spoke to a Panasonic retailer yesterday and it seems that now, Legislation!!, almost all the base units have to be fitted with non-disableable ringers. He stocked dozens of models but was unsure which had ringers you could mute.

So when I got home I took the base to pieces and found a little black object on the masterboard next to the word Buzz. I made the phone ring and it suggested an odds on chance that was where the sound came from.

"It came off in me hand, guv"

And now the base makes no noise and the handset tinkles discretely.

With regard to the range I also established that my wife had done her test whilst talking to a chum and searching from room to room for something they needed to check. What this was proving was that the phone will drop out with movement, presumably as it finds a new signal/frequency.

If you stand/sit still the range is actually not all that bad.

It does not reach nearly as far as the old Sanyo cordless I bought years ago, but that was an under-the-counter jobbie which you'd be hard pressed to find in the UK these days.

So, thanks again for all the ideas. We now have a quiet cordless with adequate range - and this thread can now revert to much more critical topics such as dreaded blue screens........

TP

Of course your cordless phone would probably show you a blue screen from time to time, if it had one, it's probably got a computer inside bigger than the one our whole university ran on 30 years ago :-)

Is anyone on here using Mac? I've failed to find a CFD account that runs on a Mac platform; the problem seems to be with the streaming prices. Has anyone had success with this?