Just a quick question i have cable internet and a normal broadband connection using AOL on the normal telephone line,the aol has been a bit a hit and miss of late on dropping the signal so after speaking to the support team they think its the inline filter that could be faulty so they are sending me out a new one.

Do they go wrong after 9 months as they seem to think they do or are they talking a load of cr@p.

I've had mine (AOL) for years.

I've heard the same thing about microfilters going wrong after a while but can't verify if this is true. I had major probs with my normal b/band earlier this year, kept dropping connection, slow speeds etc, and all was fixed by a) having the router / modem next to the master socket and b) never switching it off. I also bought myself a decent modem instead of the cheapo one they supplied.

Mega,

I think it's the standard response given by the monkeys in every broadband suppliers' call centre to blame the microfilter.

Have you removed the faceplate from the main socket and plugged your router into the master outlet which is hidden behind the faceplate?

Having previously spent hours on the phone going through all of the different check routines with Sky, it turned out in my case to be the router that had gone a bit dickey. Do you have a spare router laying around, or can you borrow one to test?

Thanks ladies and gents for your suggestions i will change my router over for another one and give that a try,process of elimination,the only reason i require it working again is the fact that the wife has been allowed home from hospital and she just loves AOL i think its total cr@p myself :-)

Quite apart from the broadband stuff, glad to hear that your wife is out of hospital Rick.

@Plateman,many thanks mate its been a very tough few weeks i can assure you but she is making progress slowly albeit it will be a very long recovery time.

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!