Plusnet is certainly not unlimited. They went through a bad patch but are apparently now much better. They do have lowish bandwidth limits though and they will slow you down before you start to hit them with the aim of stopping you dead when you do.

If you mean truly unlimited one of the Entanet resellers is about your only option at realistic prices.

zscrooge,

You might like to look back over the last two days in the Broadband thread running alongside this.

On the other hand you might not........as I am now rather embarrassed with the choices!

TP

Publisher
Sadly I am not a premium member to access that board.


Opti -i used to be on Demon a long time ago -will take another look. Cheers Kayak, I don't really need true unlimited which i know you don't get anyway, just the 40gb that usually comes in that price range.
Just wondered which might be best - i suppose they all vary month to month in surveys according to isp reviews sites. Could do with one that won't get taken over and then change the way it operates although sector consolidation looks likely to continue.

Also, is a static ip address more open to attack than one which is dynamically assigned?

Also, I notice that Demon suggest Speedtouch routers but I already have one (netgear). Would i need to change?

PC running very slow and I notice I am getting a lot of "receive" errors on my broadband line. Can anyone point me at anything that might help me find out what is going on?

If you are Tiscali, join the club, but looks to be a Tiscali/BT problem, not home PC fault. Tiscali trying to sort it, but taking forever!

Greystone

For a start...

1. What housekeeping have you done?
2. Wireless or what? Which Router or Modem if not wireless?
3. Which virus checkers done?
4. Defragged?
5. Used CCleaner yet?
6. Waggled and checked your connections (all of them)?
7. Done any downloads recently - or upgrades?
8. XP or Vista?
9. Have you disconnected the PC and connected a corded phone to see if you have noise on the phone line?

Alan, if you're using the broadband stats program and getting CRC errors on the line (you'll also have a low connection speed and/or a low SNR reading) then it's bound to be a physical problem with the line. Check integrity of wiring, jiggle connections, and check for noise on the voice side. Also worth rebooting the modem/router. Also try unplugging all telephones to see if it makes a difference.

Greystone: I'm with Kayak on this. Power cycling the router is always worthwhile. Friend of mine who is a Captain of Airbuses says it worked for his A340 as well. Bloody computers.

Thank you guys. Sorry it took me a while to get connected and reply.

The fault seems to be completely at my ISP's door. Telefonica are a bit like
BT used to be 15 years ago. "Weren't us Guv!"

I hope it is still as responsive in the morning.

Alan

I think 1 of my computers has been hijacked.
I have Spywareblaster, spybot, AVG, Superantispyware, and
Zonealarm on a Win2k computer.
Doing weekly scan Avg went from the usual 12 mins to 40
and object scanned from c50k to 102k.
Spybot went from c20mins to 40.
Cleared all files and cookies. Similar result.
Watching the scans I see things like diamod club,
cityclubcasino,goldenpalace etc.
On the other scan more than a third of the objects
appear to be Java.
Nothing unusual in programs, files, folders.
Cannot set Zalarm to high in program control.
This is probably because its been on the comp for
more than one year.
Could I rectify this by uninstalling and downloading again?
None of the above flag up anything unusual.
First got concerned last week when the computer
got sluggish. Put a futher 512k of memory in and it improved.
Then I noticed the above. Dont normally watch scans.
Any help much appreciated.
Tks.
mac.

I think ZA high setting is only available to subscribers to ZA Pro.
First easy step is to go to 'My Computer', right click Main Drive (Probably C) & click properties, then do disk clean up & remove everything not wanted.
Also, in 'Internet properties' (Control Panel) you can select the drive to clean out the temporary Internet files every time you shut down (In 'Advanced' tab).
Sounds like too much junk being stored, rather than a virus.
I will leave the tech stuff to others more competent.

I'm trying RUBotted.exe for a while just to see what happens, though nothing found as yet. Although I would have thought, that my other housekeeping stuff would have done this program's job.

It's supposed to show up the fact your machine has been grabbed by one of them robot thingies - the ones that go out on to the Internet , grab someone's computer and then use it to send out spam.

I use CCleaner for cleaning out crap and can recommend it. It's so very thorough and so very easy to use.

Fired up the comp last night-svghost.exe prog error.
" " " " this AM -cannot initialise AVG kernel intreface.
mac

May be unrelated, but friend of mine downloaded AVG 8.0 recently (as he was running 7.0 which expired) & download corrupted his existing AVG & IE. Had to format & start again having tried to remove & reload AVG & IE. Then downloaded AVG 8.0, which is running o.k. so far.

If you are wanting a 'safe source' (if there is such a thing?) for your downloads:

http://filehippo.com/

There are also other features and facilities at this site.

Tried using RUBotted, but keeps saying internet speed too slow.
Checked on two sites and both came up with 3900k and 355k,
so nothing wrong with speed.
Somthing straaang going on.
mac

Some good advice here, so as to help minimise PC problems:

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=13250

Anybody else finding problems with Firefox lately? Mine opens my google home page fine but then is very slow or fails to open a window at all but if I close the browser the PC thinks firefox is still running and I have to restart.
I bet a microsoft update has scewed firefox :-(

I have a corrupted Excel 2000 XLS file. Anyone know of a free utility that can fix it? Any tips that can help?

Thanks.

Here's a Free one called

RegCure

However, there is a downside to it:

From http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080610195440AAuZIim

"RegCure is scamware made by Paretologic, the same company that makes Xoftspy. RegCure will claim to find registry errors on a fresh-from-the-box machine, and then you have to buy the product for it to fix what it claimed to find."

I suggest you go to the 'Answers.Yahoo.com' link above and read a bit more on what might happen and how to fix it after you've used some of these so-called Free 'sort out a corrupted XL File' programs.

If you want to spend some money, then have a look at a more reputable 'costs money' program, such as 'Kernel - XLS File Recovery Software'. If you like the look of this, then you might need to shop around for the best and cheapest place to buy it.

Life ain't easy, is it? :-)