Posts by Robert Stokes

Up to 80,000 AOLers face the boot from Carphone network

One configuration...

Did some work for a local customer yesterday who was running Windows 2000 Pro. They were getting a message saying their modem was incompatible and they needed to upgrade to a SpeedTouch router. They were using one of the BT Voyager 105 modems. They also have a Windows XP machine that they are not seeing this message on so it seems W2K is one of those O/S' that is being affected.

What's more annoying (for him anyway) is that the AOL instructions must have errors in them (really, there's a surprise...). He's spent a month trying to talk to A-Oh_Hell's call centre in India as he was unable to connect and they said it was a problem with his line or or computer (odd seeing as the USB modem still worked fine). They even told him to go out and buy a new wireless card as the one in his machine was faulty (they were connecting via the Ethernet port at the time so this had no bearing on the problem but AOL refused to progress the problem further until he had gone out to get a new wireless card - the internal wireless card is working fine btw).

Eventually, after more calls yesterday they told him he should have been using a different username to sign on with rather than the screen name which the instructions told him to use.

So if anyone else has this problem, get the call centre (huh, good luck!) to check what username should be being used. My customer is now using <their phonenumber>@dialbb.com with some password they have never been given before in their lives.

They're just idiots. My customer is sending them our bill plus the receipt for his wireless network card as if they had been sensible enough to offer the right advice first time then he wouldn't have needed either of them - not to mention the call charges on their 0870 number.

We never recommend customers use them and these sorts of problems are commonplace for us. AOL give all other ISP's a bad name.

Microsoft spits out final XP service pack, beta version

It's all true

Put SP3 RC1 on my system last week. Though its a Intel E6850 with 3GB ram and a 512 video card, it is definately quicker under SP3 than it was under SP2.

As for Vista... we're system builders and so far this year we have had 2 people request Vista systems whilst everyone else wants to stick with XP - and we'll be doing this until we're no longer able to buy XP OEM media.

I've installed Vista Business 4 times and everytime have had problems. I'd like to say I can recall Windows ME with fondness but I shudder whenever someone brings an ME system in for repair). Vista IS the new ME but at least they've released a service pack for it. When ME is based partially upon Win2K, how come that has 4 service packs and ME has none. You can't seriously tell me that none of the code in ME has been borrowed from 2K.

That rug had better be a big one so that MS can quicly brush Vista under a corner of it and get onto putting out the next version.

Sacked PlusNet boss blasts BT sale 'stitch up'

Is the grass greener on the other side?

As a support company, we've been with Plusnet for almost 4 years and have recommended loads of our customers to them with barely any problems.

In this day and age, you don't get the service you used to from anyone but PlusNet have always been very helpful anytime we or our customers have had problems.

Give me them over some of the other providers we hear problems wtih day-in, day-out any day.