COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Tizer]

Didn't know that about switching off, not that it applies here, I am connected by cable 24X7.

I assumed that all broadband providers made that clear to their users. Plusnet has always warned about it.
What do you mean by `connected by cable 24X7'? Are you connected to the cabinet by coaxial cable or do you just mean you never switch off your router?

[PanBiker]

Excellent Gloria, you should have a range quoted in your contract. Up to but not less than figures. If you are lower than the bottom one you should complain. Loads of people are not getting the minimums quoted but paid for because they never check or don't know how to. Online speed checks are notoriously inaccurate, you need to see what the connection speed is between your router and the exchange, that's the contract figure.

I am throttled to 13Mbps at the moment and I ran various online speed checks yesterday, they varied between 5mbps to 45Mbps so as much use really as a chocolate teapot!

A tip if you ever need to contact technical support, see if they have a chat facility, it's a lot less stressful than the phone and you get an automatic transcript of both sides of the conversation.

[Gloria]

I've got in connection status and it gives downstream 40mbps and up 10mbps.

[PanBiker]

If that's your DSL speed to the exchange it's excellent.

[PanBiker]

Shows how rubbish the online speed tests are.

[Tizer]

A tip if you ever need to contact technical support, see if they have a chat facility, it's a lot less stressful than the phone and you get an automatic transcript of both sides of the conversation.

I'll second that and it's also a good idea to write your introductory information into a text editor in advance and then you can paste it in to the chat window to start the conversation. I do this and provide plenty of information - it gets the chat of to a good start and saves a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. Usually I find that chat lines get a faster response than trying the phone.

[Gloria]

Is this the correct thing I'm looking at?

image.png

[PanBiker]

That looks like an overview page and the figures look to have been rounded up. Unlikely that the rates are bang on 40 and 10. If there is a maintenance tab with further information you should see the actual connection speed. Various routers display the information using different terms. Maintenance pages may also show you the maximum available on your line TalkTalk routers do anyway. Look for terms like DSL rates which may be expressed as Kbps.

[Gloria]

Thank you for the help, you really are leading the most untecho person.

[Gloria]

No sign of maintenance tab or dsl rates. This is the page, I have been into them all but nothing like that there.

image.png

[PanBiker]

The first one intimates Dynamic DSL that would be the one that should show you the throughput from the exchange.

[Gloria]

Got that far, but the dynamic service says off, and when I switch it on its asking me for usernames and passwords. I filled in what I thought was right, it then gave me a list to choose from. I can see myself getting in a right pickle with this and am not confident at all .
I think I'm going to chicken out and leave it. Thankyou all so very much for all the help.

[PanBiker]

Can't really see why that section should be asking for further credentials. It will only show you the IP address allocated from the router pool at the exchange. With the service switched off it would intimate that you are using an exclusive static IP address which can be costly for an ISP as they would need a different reserved address for every home router they supplied. Bit of a mystery that.

Anyway as long as you are happy with what you are getting and what you are paying.

[Gloria]

Thankyou, just thought I'd put them on so you see what I am seeing. I clicked it to on and this is what I got.

image.png

image.png

[Pluggy]

I've not quite got the gist of Gloria's story here but unless you're a hardline geek running a server via an ordinary ISP. You do not need to enable a Dynamic DNS service. Its nothing to do with the IP address the ISP loans you for your internet to work (not quite true but it may as well be). Its so that if you want people to be able to access a server or something in your home, you can give a domain name the IP address the ISP has given you. Its an extra security risk of you don't know what your'e doing.

In my signiture is a link to my home monitoring system. This runs as a webserver from a Raspberry Pi in my home. The duckdns is a Dynamic DNS service that I use.so I can run my own webserver without needing a real live static IP address for it. If you're a normal person just using the internet for normal stuff, you do not need a Dynamic DNS service or enable your router to be able to use one.

[PanBiker]

Indeed Pluggy see below. I blame it on age and brain surgery.

I have just checked on my router and the Dynamic DNS service is not enabled on that either. It's not passworded though. I have forgotten some of my CISCO training and I have confused DDNS with Dynamic addressing. DSL is what you are actually looking for, my bad as the trendy would say. Leave those settings as they are.

Your true speed settings with the exchange must be hiding somewhere else in the bowels of your router and may well not be accessible. You don't need to chase unless you have issues. I assume your rounded up figures would give you indication if anything major was wrong.

[Gloria]

Far too complicated to get my ageing brain around, I will now leave it alone.
Thankyou all for your help, this is what I love about this site.

[Stanley]

Glad you are sorted Gloria.....
Tiz, it means what it says on the tin, router connected to box by cable and never switched off.

[Tizer]

Stanley, I thought that was the more likely explanation, but routers do go off at times due to loss of power supply to the house. We used to have that frequently when we lived in the village but fortunately bot enough breaks in quick succession to freak out the router. The ISPs tend to warn people about not switching off their router because there are some folk out there who, at first, think they should switch it off when they go on holiday or even when they go shopping! (Remember when some used to never pull plugs out of mains sockets because they thought the electricity would escape?)

Far too complicated to get my ageing brain around, I will now leave it alone. Thank you all for your help, this is what I love about this site.

My brain wouldn't cope with what you've been faced with, Gloria, and I agree, this is what's so good about OGFB. Wasn't it you who first introduced me to OG when we were both using the Cemsearch family history site many moons ago?

Pluggy. I've found an odd discrepancy between my two computers. It's not a significant problem but I don't understand why it occurs. I reported how I've found that on the new PC I can quickly make a zip archive of my backup files and transfer that file easily to the external hard disk. It takes about 9 minutes to make a 9.3 GB zip archive from 11.5 GB of files/folders and 1 minute to transfer to the disk. But when I tried to do exactly the same on the old PC, creation of the archive was very slow and I had to cancel it after an hour. I tried making a .tar.gz compressed archive and had the same problem. Then I tried a .tar uncompressed archive and it created the 15GB archive in 18 minutes and took 6 minutes to transfer to the external disk. I don't know why the new PC will make a compressed archive quickly but the old PC doesn't like doing it. Any ideas? It's not a hassle, I can make the .tar archives OK on the old one but I'm just curious.

[Pluggy]

At a guess, the old machine has a HDD, rather than an SSD, 4GB of RAM rather than 8 and a slower processor than the new one. The old one was a pretty decent machine in 2013 when I built it, the new one is a pretty decent machine today. Stuff has moved on. You give it something serious to do and the 6 years shows. Run of the mill stuff won't show much difference.

Surfing the internet on a newish laptop with a cheap Pentium and 4GB Ram on windows 10 isn't a lot different to to doing it on an a newish desktop with an I5 processor and 8GB on Windows 10. Installing the latest feature Upgrade of windows 10 on the laptop takes all all afternoon and about 25 minutes on the desktop.

[Gloria]

Tizer, was it the cemsearch site or genes reunited?

[Tizer]

I suppose you're right Pluggy, I'm just expecting too much from the old one!

Tizer, was it the cemsearch site or genes reunited?

It was cemsearch, I can't recall ever using genes reunited. I don't know if cemsearch is active any more - it was run by a couple who would park up their motor caravan in a cemetery and go round recording the gravestone inscriptions and then put them online. She said they got some funny looks from people when they stopped and ate their sandwiches at the van, sitting admiring the gravestones!

[Stanley]

Whatever turns you on.......

[plaques]

I've been guilty of wandering round cemeteries with my camera. Not for gravestones per se although the odd monolith does old the family history of the rich and famous. locally that is. My main interest has been war memorials especially the older ones in church yards. I try to keep my wanderings in daylight hours though.

[Tizer]

It's all in a day's work for family history buffs. Unfortunately a lot of gravestones have been vandalised and others have been taken down because of H&S concerns when they were leaning. Sometimes the people who took them down left them lying face down or leant facing towards a wall, which is disrespectful and isn't very helpful for the historians. I found my great-grandfather's gravestone in a churchyard at Mellor had been moved and put up against the yard boundary wall, fortunately facing out. It also has the details of some other member's of the family and has some lovely decoration showing sheep - they were handloom weavers.

If you want a bit of fun fiction to read, try Terry Pratchett's `Johnny and the Dead'. It's really a children's book but appeals to adults too and is about young Johnny who finds he can `see' the the old folk getting out of their graves in the night and having fun. A very funny book!