Posts by Steven Snape

Virgin Media set-top box modder gets 5 years

I think 5 years is fair

I think 5 years is a fair sentence assuming they have been selling hundreds or thousands of these boxes. They took the risk, they failed or got greedy and now they pay. Nice to see a sentence given out that might make others think twice before filling the new gap in the market.

It might even reduce the amount of smug gits on benefits on council estates bragging about how they get free cable and how they got their gas cooker fitted for free by claiming they could smell gas and all the other scams they learn about down the pub while the rest of the world is out working.

Police spent tens of thousands on failed BitTorrent probe

Simple solution

A simple solution to fix most of the music piracy would be to follow Microsoft. At some point I assume Microsoft realised that students dont have much money and released a copy of MS Office which students could afford. If the music industry reduce the cost of albums to a sensible level sales will rise and I am sure profits will rise with them.

Brown offers free laptops to deprived UK schoolkids

I am going to use my right to free speech

Gordon Brown is a tw@t.

Thats it Gordon spend more money and increase the government deficit. While your at it why not give the 'deprived' a free internet access aswell. I am sure they will use these gifts wisely.

Heres an idea. Why not give 'deprived' children who go to school or college money to help them buy books and stationary. My mistake he already does that with EMA and 90% of them spend the money on Drink or Drugs to aid their anti social behavoir.

ISPs slam Digital Economy Bill's multi-million pound price tag

Everybody quoting the 1.7bn against the 0.5bn

Everybody quoting the 1.7bn record company gain against our 0.5bn costs asking why are we paying for it, Cant you see the obvious tax gains for Gordon Brown.

Our ISP costs go up that will result in an increased VAT payment - Kerching!

Illegal downloads will reduce in numbers, More VAT - Kerching!

Record company bosses get bonuses, Income tax and other taxes - Kerching, Kerching!

Record company boss can afford to put fuel in his yacht and aeroplane, Fuel duty and VAT - Kerching!

The winner is Gordon Brown.

The losers are us, your 6 year old nephew who downloaded 'Steps Greatest Hits' and your 70 year old grandad whos wireless has been used by all the file sharers in the street because he has only just learnt how to switch his pc on and find google but understandably has not quite mastered wireless encryption.

Top Gear tops iPlayer hit list

PS3 users prefer comedy shows like Mock The Week...

...I would never had expected that. I would have thought Last Of The Summer Wine was more of a PS3 users type of program.

Small biz told to sort TV licences for PCs

I feel short changed

I resent paying my license fee to pay for countless naff dramas, Eastenders, Casualty, Wossy, Moyles, Countless angry shouty police based drams, Excessive quantities and duplications of news reporters for their many tv and radio channels, and excessive teams of people and presenters at festivals like Glastonbury.

I only really watch TopGear and the occassional comedy. Hardley value for money is it!

I say encrypt the BBC and see how many people sign up then. My guess is that Sky1 might suddenly become more popular without the BBC's unfair advantage.

T-Orange: And then there were four

Does this mean an end to those sh!te T-Mobile adverts

I wouldnt go with T-Mobile just incase I turned into one of those singing zombies in the adverts.

Microsoft strikes back at Outlook 2010 rendering grumbles

Drop a grenade on Outlook and start again

Like all MS software Outlook has been filled with features you dont want or need, It likes crashing, It wants to venture into unnecessary areas of your pc and it eats memory and cpu time.

Im still using Office and Outlook 2000 and it works rather well and leaves my resources free for other activities.

Microsoft to bomb Europe with IE-free Windows 7

This is pretty funny stuff...

Its like a South Park christmas with all offending the items removed, but with Windows instead.

Give the complainers what they ask for and see how much they enjoy the end result.

Microsoft squirts out Vista SP2

What I find annoying

What I find annoying is that to install SP2 you have to first install SP1. As a simle tech who has to rescue virus infected home pc's, usually by the lazy but effective backup data and run manufacturers system recovery method. This means ideally I have to now install 2 seperate service packs to help stop the muppets getting infected again. This wont be fun on the old cheap celeron laptops with 512mb ram. Maybe I should train a chimp to press the right buttons on a keyboard and swap disks every 50 minutes.

Microsoft killing free XP support next week

Things could be worse.

I suspect things would be a lot worse if it wasnt for netbooks and the Intel Atom and similar. The threat of Linux on netbooks is probably the only reason XP is still available. I am suprised that MS are continuing critical updates until 2014, I was expecting 2010 or 2012.

I assume MS might have come up with a proper upgrade and a product people want by 2014.

UK.gov thinks internet should be run like BSkyB

No free internet

Not really suprising as it would instantly put providers out of business and chances are if it was free the government would find a way of taxing use of it. Free internet would lose the government £1,000,000's.

And all this Iplayer bandwidth hogging that ISP's are complaining about is seriously annoying as I remember watching Tomorrows World many years ago and a bod from ClaraNet was predicting and hyping up that IPTV would be a big thing in the future. So ISP's in general cant say they didnt see it coming!

Microsoft's Automatic Update - the way to browser competition?

Forced to choose??

I await another confused phonecall from my parents and grand parents.

Being a computer tech dealing with the genrral public I dont think forcing a choice is a good idea as I would say that over 50% of customers do not even know what Internet Explorer is, they just know of it as Talk Talk, BT, Pipex, Etc... They would end up choosing their browser based on which name they like the best and I would have to pick up the pieces when there browser has changed and their buttons are not where and what they used to be.

Personally I am happy to have IE on my PC and choose to use another browser.

Last major VHS supplier ejects from tape biz

How much :O

£20 for a blueray disk, No wonder Zavvi and Wollies have gone tits up.

I can go to the cinema for less than half that price and see hi-def massive screen with a multi thousand pound sound system. I will only get to see the movie once but why would I want to see it twice? Just a shame about the oik flicking popcorn at the back of my head :)

Sell me a blueray disk for the price of a cinema ticket and I might join the blueray party.

MS issues brown alert over unpatched IE 7 flaw

As a non nerdie tech dealing with the public

I would suggest to Microsoft to release IE as one program like it already is but in three flavours that idiots can understand an deal with:

RED (no java/no script/no activeX, etc): Use for smut, music, torrents, general browsing and things that are high risk.

ORANGE: Use for sites that you need to use but cant use on red.

GREEN (standard IE): Use for banking and shooping and big name sites, bbc, etc

You can tell the public to download Firefox as much as you like but 50% of them will get a virus trying to do that.

A stupid idea?? I'll get my coat :)

Seagate slashes bare drive warranties

I have never used their drives anyway

I just hope it doesnt affect the quality from other manufacturers. I still have memories of the doomed Fujitsu MPG-3 series of drives with the ticking timebomb Cirrus Logic chips.

On a personal note. I have never bought a Seatgate drive because of the percentage of failures I have seen of their drives fitted to branded equipment. Maybe my perception is wrong because they just have more drives out there after striking deals with the big name high street pc builders.

Also as a small time PC repair business I have never returned a HDD to a manufacturer under warranty. After reading the returns procedure which roughly reads, run their test software, ship to ireland, wait 6 weeks, hope they find the fault or have to pay some cash to have the drive shipped back. All this for a 3 year old 40GB drive that I could replace/upgrade for £25 Why would I bother??

Software update nobbles Sky+ boxes

They want £65 to fix my box!!!

I find that quite hard to swallow as it worked on Monday and stopped working on the Tuesday becuse the update screwed it up. Technically I know my box is still fine so they aint getting £65 from me. If it aint fixed my christmas Sky will be at least one customer short.

I do have an upgraded hdd but this was only upgraded because the original failed, Swapped a Maxtor 40GB for a Maxtor 80GB. The biggest problem as a helpless consumer at the moment is that its probably only Digital Spy where people are aware of that this is a software problem and the majority of people who lurk in the Digital Spy Sky+ forum have upgraded their disks. There are reports in there of untouched boxes failing but its probably at a ratio of 1 in 10. It would be interesting to see what happens to this ratio if the uninformed find out. I would like to know how they also feel about paying out £65 for the repairs after finding out?

Time to grab my coat I think. I just hope the grass is greener elsewhere.

Michael Dell sells you some s**t you don't need

Not what I was expecting

I thought this was going to be an article on all the bundled software that comes with a Dell that harrasses you over the first 30 days of use and makes your life a misery and confuses the hell out of the average numbty.

I do wish they wouldnt subsidise the cost of their PC's by filling them with crap.

Sky and BBC in iPlayer deal

SKY Player

I use it and I like it for the movies, Especially since the true VOD was introduced. If only the entertainment section was free. Overall a thumbs up from me.

It used to be a pig to install, Especially on an XP Media Center pc. You had to install things like "service rollup 2", "media player 11" and countless other large updates before any success. Fortunately I think the actual package you download from SKY has improved over what it was last year. I think some updates are included.

Having to de/re-register after a reload is a pain but I guess they have little choice in the days of DRM.

Thus passes to C&W

This coud make my decision easier...

This could make my decision easier. I have been thinking about leaving them to join TalkTalk for cheaper calls, line rental and internet.

As for my age, I am 32 and I have only been with Demon for 3 years. I was with Claranet before but moved to Demon because of Claranets uncompetative packages.

Is the earth getting warmer, or cooler?

What I want to know is...

When will I have the beach on doorstep and be able to grow my own bananas at my home in Birmingham

Windows XP SP3 sends PCs into endless reboot

Vacation time?

As a self employed computer tech do I stick around and cash-in from the potential fallout or go on vacation and return when the dust has settled.

Sky plays the victim over Ofcom pay TV rights probe

Maybe SKY deserve their postion???

Think back to the days before Sky. What were we getting in terms of sport and movies?? Indoor bowls, Darts and repeats of James Bond and Superman. The BBC and ITV would not spend any decent money on sport or movies. This is why people bought into SKY, Dont punish Sky for their own success, That would be lame!!

Sky is an opt in service for consumers and surely football on free TV is not a human right!

BTW I personally hate football :)