Quest for Scratch ....

well, kind of !
I am a golf fanatic .. i finally have a handicap, single digits - 9, respectable.

I am aiming within a year to be down to 5 - will post a diary here.

Reasons to avoid Virgin media

1. They are rubbish.

2. They mislead you to the point of dishonesty!

A couple of the issues we have

1. TV quality - is worse than an old VHS video tape. We got a perfect picture through sky and still do with blueray and dvd's. With the Virgin TV - the pixelation and blocking is terrible, and any movement on the screen causes distortion. vasically, it looks like an old video game in 256 colour VGA mode!
   
   
2. Broadband - is fast, but is instantly restricted as soon as anything more than a few hundred kilobytes is requested. i pay a lot of money for the 50mb XXL package and its supposed to guarentee their traffic limiting software doesnt restrict the bandwidth at any time. I download a lot from iTunes (HD TV series for example) and upload a lot to offsite backups ... a 1.6gb HD episode takes on averageover an hour. This is just not good. The reason seems to be that Virgin allow you to pay for the full connection and then slow anything they include as file sharing - which seems to incllude in my case iTunes!
   
   The following table is form their website regarding download limits:
   http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/traffic-management/traffic-management-policy.html
   
   stating no limit on 50MB customers ....
   
   THIS IS CERTAINLY NOT MY EXPERIENCE WITH THEM. I have so far tried this early morning, lunchtime, afternoon, evening and overnight and it appears that downloading from anywhere, iTunes, FTP servers, Dropbox, Amazon S3 is all considered high usage after the first few MB and restricted.
   
   
3. They are expensive. Their basic package (which gives you next to nothing) is cheap, but if you want Sky Sports, you pay a lot more than sky charge. Pay for the HD package on Virgin - you have to pay AGAIN to recieve sky premium channels (sports and movies) in HD too. My bill is about 45 pounds a month more than i paid with sky - i get less channels, less HD, less picture quality for my extra money.
   
   
4. Their equipment sucks ... the box is sub standard, the remote feels really cheap and you have to press everything 3 times to get it to react. You cannot start recording from within delay TV (sky you can), you can't record remotely (sky you can), the planned recordings and series links quite simply dont work (sky they do). The back button is most annoying thing in the world ... and the on demand selection is so old it could have been picked out by Methuselah as part of a school project.
   
   But lets not be unfair - you can have the same functionality as Sky offer in their basic Sky+box from the new Tivo service, in exchange for a further 100 notes and a new contract for a year!
   
   
5. Their sales stuff states that you can amend your channel packages online line, both adding and removing - and makes a big deal about "Sky dont let you remove channels online" .... Swing and a miss Virgin - my online account lets me do neither add or remove - it lets me go through the 3 page forms about what i want to do before telling me this service isn't available and i have ot phone in!
6. Our contract was agreed at 12 months, they sent one for 18, when queried said sign it, we'll note it down. But dont seem to have remembered! This is actually my own fault for believeing them, but still ... a bit cheaky!
   
   

Well, there is lots more but fear of developing a RSI in typing that much means i must stop!

I'd like the thank Be Broadband ....

as without their efforts - i might have had a good internet connection that doesnt drop evey two minutes and make working from home impossible.

Their continual efforts at explaining that ASDL equipment isn't flawless and sometimes needing a reboot is normal have helped to put my mind at ease at the two reboots a day and the constant drops in connection and made the bill much easier to swallow.

Enough with the sarcasm ... time for a new provider me thinks!

New Year, New Resolution

Dear Santa,

This year, I will be a good boy and post regular blog entries. I may even make one or two of them good.

Please visit me when Christmas comes.

Parallels Desktop 5 - Internet Sharing with XP

Recent swap to parallels from VMWare led to issues with network shares with MAC OS X as the host

Click to read more ...