Interesting idea but a 3 year contract (on a cursory glance, I might be wrong). I would strongly discourage anyone from signing even a one year contract for broadband. The broadband market is moving very quickly and you certainly don't want to be stuck for three years with an ISP that isn't performing. Imagine trying to trade with your pages timing out and being unable to move ISP.

The '24Mb when available next year' is a bit of a red herring. Most BT exchanges will be upgraded starting next year (it could be 2-3 years before they all are) and no doubt all providers will offer 24Mb when available on your local exchange.

I've got a self-induced problem with the DVD drives on my PC that I wil be very grateful for help with.

I wanted to replace on of them with another drive. I disconnected both (for easier access) drive data & power cables, but them found that there isn't room to get the drive that I wanted to change out. I replaced the data & power cables for both drives, but they neither of them work - there appears to be no power supply to them - they drive doors will not open & they do not show up on the system.

When I've changed drives before I've alwasy been able to do a straight swap without any trouble.

Any help with where I've gone wrong will be greatly appreciated

thanks

Have you pushed the power cable plug fully home? They are sometimes very difficult to get fully in. Do you have a voltage tester? The voltage on the plugs is very low. I think it is 3.5v in some cases. Another possibility is that there are often spare power feed plug inside the case for extra peripherals. Try connecting to another power cable plug. If they won't stretch then do it with the DVD external to the case just to test the door opening. Is there power going to any other part of the PC, such as other peripherals? There may be a fuse on the power supply itself. Fuse on the mains plug? Running out of ideas now.

Thanks for your reply Haystack.

All other devices, extra & external (usb) hard drives are ok.
Everything on PC is OK except for the 2 DVD drives!!
No spare power cables unfortunately.
Have tried re-seating powers cables several times - no effect - will try again as they are a bit difficult to access because of their position.

Thanks again - greatly appreciated

Have you looked at the Bios settings. If you have booted the nachine up without the devices, it may have forgotten them. It may depend on whether you have PnP (plus and play) enabled at that low level. If you haven't then you may have to explicitly mention their existence. The Bios system is much more intelligent these days and can work out a lot stuff for itself, if it allowed to.

Thanks for that - will have a look - but I am coming to the conclusion tho that it's a PSU problem - I connected the spare drive with the same (no power) result. Might have to get a new PSU :-(

ChuffChuffChaser

When you switch the computer on with the problem drive connected, does the machine boot OK.

Assuming it does, try unpluging it and swaping the powerlead from one of the other devices to your DVD drive if it still doesn't work it is not the PSU.

Hi Optimist - yes everything boots up & runs ok - just the 2 DVD drives. Surprising as it seems, there are no spare power leads - the only power leads, (other than the one feeding the DVDs), are the ones for the mainboard, sata drives, etc - none of them would of course fit the DVD drives

Looking at the DVD power feeds - how are these set up - are they 2 connectors daisy chained together or separate ones? In disconnecting the power you may have dislodged one of the wires that go into the plastic power connector.

a cheap case fan that connects to the IDE drive power connector may be a useful test tool. I've got one that has a female and male connection so you don't loose a drive power cable on just the fan.

Are you positive the drives worked immediately before?
Is the PSU wattage man enough for the job - you mention additional and usb drives.
what happens if you disconnect power to all but the essential devices?
hidden in the bios menus may be power outputs for various voltage levels - do these look to be within 5 percent of the stated values.

ChuffChuffChaser

I see your problem. A new PSU may well be your best bet, but assuming it is a standard sized one, get one with plenty of leads and power to spare.

If you can get a new PSU from a shop, take the DVD drive with you and get them to hook it up to another machine.

Huxley - 3 connectors daisy chained - only 2 of which are used. The drives worked ok before I started "pratting" about :-((

Could be the psu is not powerful enough - I have 1 extra internal & 2 extra external drives (1 of which is rarely turned on & was off at the time).

Optimist - I will try the spare DVD (which also would not power up) on my wife's machine see how it goes.

Thank you again for your interest & response & similar thanks to you Huxley

Broadband speed query please.
I have just had a BT chappie round to test my line 'n stuff because of problems with BT Broadband. I am convinced it's them mainly but I'll let that pass for now.

The fault had cleared itself however he still came because, I think, I'm getting a bit uppity with them (5 faults in 9 months - less than 0.5 meg - which then clears itself after 4 or 5 days). At my base socket he was receiving a bit over 5meg. My upstairs PC only gets 3.5 meg at best. He said that my internal wiring was suspect. It is over 20 years old, routed around the front of the house, trapped between new plastic facia and brick wall, teed wrongly etc, etc.
My first thought was to re-run internal cable to my upstairs office but then thought that "wireless" would be easier option.

I have a wireless router. I would need a card for my PC.

Questions; I've read on here that wireless is not as good as hard wiring (I use an ethernet lead at the moment). However in this case, my office is directly above the main socket so no brick walls, could wireless, with my router down there, be better ?
Which card for my PC? What to look for?
As always, thanks in advance.

I use a Netgear router and USB WiFi adapters on the slave PCs. I get 108Mbs internally between the router and the WiFi adapters. The real speed is just determined by the connection to my ISP. This is supposed to be 18Mbs, but I get around 12Mbs usually. As the end user it is unlikely that you see a difference between wired and Wifi if the WiFi works alright in your physica room layout.

Bolshi,

I went down the home socket route. Here are some alternatives

http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/default_ShopGroup.asp?ShopGroupID=61

And this looks like a good idea.

http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/Shop/ShopSearch.asp?CategoryID=336

My problem is caused by living in a Victorian flat with thick walls. WiFi will hardly go from room to room - but the socket system (with Wifi as well) is brilliant.

TP

Bolshi, there are actually a number of options:

Note that it is not sufficient just to plug into the master socket -- you need to disconnect the internal wiring at the master socket and reconnect it after the ADSL splitter, but of course you don't then need filters on any other sockets. This is what the engineer would have done when he pronounced the master socket better. This applies to all the options below.

1. Get BT to relocate the master socket to near your computer. This is probably the best technically unless you want wireless access in other rooms. BT charge for this, I think 30-50 or so. You can also do it yourself but it is illegal to do so.

2. Put the router downstairs and run a 100Mbps Ethernet cable up to your office (subject to any uppety wife). Probably next best technically.

3. You can try leaving everything as it is but disconnecting the bell wire in each socket. This is the third wire in a telephone cable, it is not normally needed by modern phones and has a tendency to act as an aerial picking up AM transmissions which interfere with ADSL.

4. Probably the worst solution technically is the wireless router. Personally I can readily tell the difference between a wired and fixed connection while browsing (although both are acceptable). Points to note are that the nominal speed is the total bandwidth, not in each direction, and will never be attained. So even a router claiming 108Mbps does not do more than 20-30Mbps in terms of throughput. Get a PC card of the same make as the router and if you use USB ensure that both computer and card are using the more modern USB 2.0, otherwise that will limit your bandwidth.

Phew! That's given me some things to ponder. Many thanks everyone.

"subject to any uppety wife"? Love it :-)

Help required please,i use one pc for a small business project which has a email address setup for say sales@****.co.uk,is it possible to add another email address to OE from a different host company like admin@****.com,so that i can keep 2 sales email address on the same computer,is it a case of just adding it in the setup????

Rick....

It is 'tools', 'accounts', 'mail', 'add'

Mega Bucks

You should be able to add as many email addresses as you want to OE and you should be able to set up a rule to direct messages from the 2nd account to a different folder. I'm not sure how easy it is to specify the 2nd email address as the sender on outgoing messages, but another way would be to install Thunderbird Mail Client and use that for your 2nd account.

Thanks folks.