MB,

Before buying any new bits and bobs.

Check with your neighbours if they have any problems.

I had similar problems as you describe and was being phob off by my provider who wanted to flog me everything under the sun.

Checking with next door, it was apparent that the problem was line in.

After a few curses and speaking to different rungs on ladder, they provided a BT engineer who shinned up the pole and changed the line.

Showing me what he had replaced which was rotten, as were the remaining lines which he didn't replace/

The line is perfect.


Worth a thought.


(For various reasons the ordinary line conduction for phone doesn't have to show obvious corruption.)

Well i changed out my router and it looks like that may well have been the problem it certainly seems alot faster and has not crashed as yet but will give it a minimum of 48hrs to make a final verdict.

Mega - good to hear your wife is home. Is she up to nagging speed yet? :-)

skinny,if it was a couple of months ago she would have won a gold medal for nagging as yet i cannot find the volume control :-)

Does anyone have any experience of Solid disc drives - are they really as good as the adverts say?

SSD disk are very good. They do have some drawbacks though. They have limits on how many writes you can make safely. This can make regular defragmenting a problem. In fact some software such as Smart Defrag will warn you as you go to defrag a SSD disk.

They are pretty fast at random transfers as there is almost no latency time due to normal disk revolution and read head movement time. There are disks that are faster though as regards transfer times such as Fujitsu and Samsung.

My kids have an SSD disk as the C: disk. I added a fast disk and it turned out to be faster than the solid state disk. It depends on what you want to do with it. If you want to use it as the Windows disk and add software to other disks then it should be fine. If you do get an SSD disk then move the Windows swap file to another disk. This will cut down on the writes to it.

Thanks for the insight Haystack.

Anybody know any simple free drawing software. I am trying to design new bathroom

tks skinny very good :)

I have tried that one, but my drawings have not brought any inspiration yet

Google Sketchup (now known as Trimble Sketchup) here.

They use sketchup in our school, my lad wants it on his comp so thanks for the link Seymour.,.

Ten thousand!

You wasted it though Skinny ;-)

Tks SC.

Have downloaded and will give it a try tomorrow

Bob

For those who would like their own chart page: If you select your stock and make a chart of your choice eg basic chart or a custom chart with the ticks in boxes to display what you would need. click the paste to chart button, highlight the script and copy. I'm on XP so you may have to look for notepad, mine is - start-all programs-accessories-notepad. when notepad is open, paste the script here and save with a name and the extension .HTM to a folder you use, ie. my docs. close notepad and reopen my docs folder, you should see an explorer icon there now, double click this and a new browser tab will open with your chart in. I find a chart size of 520 good depending on screen size, also make sure the tick is in update daily, then every time you refresh the page it will update. When you paste new charts in, Right click the folder and choose "open with"--notepad, then past new chart script in. When you have a few best to arrange in alphabetical order then you can find your chart easily when loaded. Any probs let me know. BB

What are peoples opinions on Sky cable broadband as i have had enough of AOL and gone for the pro cable option with upto 70gig speed,was it a wise option or not as i wanted to try and keep everything under one package.Service reliability is suppposed to be as is customer support.

Any opinions please !!

Thanks

Mega,

I've been a Sky broadband user for the last 7 or 8 years, albeit I don't yet use their cable broadband. Whatever people might think of Murdoch as a person, he has a fantastic knack of producing great in-demand products at exactly the right price!

Sky customer support is quite good, but they do have a very irritating tiered call centre system whereby you start off with someone in the Philippines who gets you to go through all the basic routines of unplugging everything before elevating you to the next level of customer support. Once you reach support level 4 after 48 hours you get to speak to a Geordie who you can understand less than the first person you spoke to in Manilla! It's therefore a good idea to ask for the direct dial number for the top level of support if/when you get to speak to them.

The most annoying thing about Sky broadband is that their routers use their own firmware which hides the account username and password from customers. I assume they do the same with cable broadband? If your router goes a bit dickey it becomes a problem as they then expect you to wait without broadband until they send their own replacement router. It also means that you are stuck using the crappy Sky router.

Fortunately, there are pages on the various unofficial Sky forums which tell you how to hack the username and password out of a Sky router, so I suggest you do that asap after installation and keep it safe somewhere in case you ever need it or want to upgrade to a better router.

@Hils,thanks for your input,advice regarding sky customer services,they have just bought out a brand new modem router in the last 2 weeks so it should be even more reliable and a better wifi facility.They wont be able to add the new cable modem for another 10 days but it will be much more reliable than what i currently have i wish i had never changed away from Virgin as a dedicated cable modem is so much more reliable than copper wire broadband.

I dont regret changing to Sky as the current AOL broadbank is getting beyond a joke and keeps dropping a signal and the service is not the best.

Mega - are you sure its not 'operator error' :-)

I've been with AOL (mainly due to lethargy) for about 17 years without many problems.