COMPUTERS, THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY

[Pluggy]

I was suspecting this was going to happen sooner or later. I just got a call from EE aka Orange saying they're killing off the second line tariff I'm on now. As I suspected the price is going up, but not as much I was expecting. They've sweetened it with 500 any network mobile minutes as well as International and anytime UK landline calls i get now. Its cheaper than what I can get signing up as a new customer and still cheaper than anybody else so I'll stay put. I won't be on the limited 8mb/s broadband either and I can't say I'll be sorry to see the back of the second line. £20 a month all in with line rental. It was £15.75 but with the inevitable 0845/0870 calls which are now included usually came to about £18 a month. I don't feel too badly done by with the new deal. I get a new router thrown in but its a new 12 month contract. They are turning off the second line within 48 hours. I'll let you know how it goes......

[Stanley]

The Cunning Wheeze department has been busy Pluggy! Clever little sods aren't they... I've realised that Talktalk have a cunning little plan as well, designed to take the load off their servers at the peak time of 09:00 when all the overnight emails are being answered. They won't accept emails with multiple recipients till about 10:00. No sweat as mine go out early or later in the morning but I'll bet some people find this a problem.

[Gearce]

Should you be using Windows Internet Explorer and you suddenly find that the webpage doesn't open as maximised, here's a solution which worked for me.

Stretch out the webpage to full size. Don't use maximise.
Choose any link on that webpage and right-click > Open in New Window.
Stretch out the second window to full size. Again don't use maximise.
Close the first IE window. Then close the second window.

Now, when you open a webpage, it should open as maximised.

[Wendyf]

Col's Paypal account was hacked yesterday. Someone appears to have added a new delivery address to the account and ordered items worth about £150. He contacted Paypal immediately and they "found in his favour", but there was no explanation of how it could have happened, especially how an address can be added to an account without a confirmation email being sent out. A worrying day changing passwords.

[PanBiker]

Have you escalated this to the Police Wendy, can the address be traced? It breaks the law in a number of areas and I would have though warrants chasing further.

[Pluggy]

If the Paypal account has been accessed from a Windows machine (or an Android phone/tablet, the up and coming cr*p haven), I'd be checking said machine for malware. Nicking money from Paypal accounts is what a fair proportion of malware is written for. Paypal will often payout without fuss so that it doesn't escalate and they lose business because of it. The banks do the same thing, you get your money back straight away and you don't make a lot of negative noise about it.

[Tripps]

I had all my money stolen on Skype, by someone making calls to Egypt and Indonesia. They acknowledged it had happened, but would not reimburse me at all.

Bad news on the new cheap Android . It failed within the warranty period, so I returned it, and asked for a refund rather than a replacement. The six month warranty says this is an option. . The seller has been giving me the runaround ever since. Asking repeatedly for the same information - which they actually already had etc. I got a profuse apology on Monday, and promise of action, but once again they have let me down.

"really sorry again for all the waiting time, we promise not to make this mistake any more, sorry for this again hope can have your kind forgiveness" sic

I told him I forgave him, but still no response. I seem to be powerless to act. Everything is out of time, both on paypal and ebay.
It was only £55 pounds, so not too devastating, but annoying. I broke my own rule when I bought it which was only buy items up to about £20 on ebay.
I shall send another email today to my friends Becky, Nico, Angela, Cecelia, Jason, and of course hai xuanwei who have all been in touch.

[Wendyf]

Col is usually keen on security and a scan found nothing yesterday. He's suspecting his Google account as a possible weak spot.

[Pluggy]

I had all my money stolen on Skype, by someone making calls to Egypt and Indonesia. They acknowledged it had happened, but would not reimburse me at all.

Bad news on the new cheap Android . It failed within the warranty period, so I returned it, and asked for a refund rather than a replacement. The six month warranty says this is an option. . The seller has been giving me the runaround ever since. Asking repeatedly for the same information - which they actually already had etc. I got a profuse apology on Monday, and promise of action, but once again they have let me down.

"really sorry again for all the waiting time, we promise not to make this mistake any more, sorry for this again hope can have your kind forgiveness" sic

I told him I forgave him, but still no response. I seem to be powerless to act. Everything is out of time, both on paypal and ebay.
It was only £55 pounds, so not too devastating, but annoying. I broke my own rule when I bought it which was only buy items up to about £20 on ebay.
I shall send another email today to my friends Becky, Nico, Angela, Cecelia, Jason, and of course hai xuanwei who have all been in touch.

Note to self, avoid cheap android tablets....

Business has been a little slack of late, so I'm holding off on buying at the moment.

Glad to see you're on top of security Wendy.

Update on the phone, Second line has gone, I was expecting an engineer last Friday because we've had slow internet and a crackling phone line, no-one showed, haven't got around to swearing at them yet. But I noticed in the last day or two the crackle on the phone has gone and the internet speed is faster than its ever been. 13.4 Mb/s. Maybe they worked some magic at the exchange and didn't need to call. I'll keep an eye on it. It's maybe been OK for a few days, I got a job in today that required serious Windows updates and I noticed they were coming in at a fair lick, so I did a speed check.....

There's life in EE/Orange yet.

[Wendyf]

Col has cheered up today after managing to repair his wide screen Dell monitor which failed the other day. He even found the necessary component in a box of bits & pieces....lots of money saved!

[PanBiker]

Nice one Colin. I rescued my LCD monitor not long ago from intermittent startup with 6 capacitors in the PSU. £2.50 for the bits and a bit of soldering. Experience from twenty years as a field service engineer helped as well. Us old sparky guys do come in useful sometimes.

[Wendyf]

I think opening it up presented the biggest challenge.

[PanBiker]

Aye, tricky these oriental designers, not a single screw in mine. A bit like a Chinese puzzle.

[Tripps]

" tricky these oriental designers,"
Not as tricky as the Chinese tablet sellers in Glasgow! They said they'd been in business for ten years. I looked them up in Companies House - registered a month before my purchase with a share capital of £1. I'm sending them best wishes for the Chinese New Year tomorrow - it's on the 10th Feb. It's the year of the snake - very suitable in the circumstances.

[Stanley]

Commiserations all round from the sound of it! Tinternetwebthingy is wonderful but very dangerous..... I stick to boring things and avoid accounts with anyone I don't need.

[Tripps]

This happened last night. Tried to connect my new toy - an Archos mp3 player to my ASUS laptop. I connect things via a USB extension lead so I don't have to go fiddling round the back of the computer. I may have got the lead reversed, but it all happened so quickly, I'm not sure. Anyway, the computer immediately went totally dead - everything switched off.
First thought was that a fuse had gone, but that would be internal, and I didn't fancy opening it up until morning. Fired up the spare laptop, and asked Mr Google.

I found a discussion board which suggested the the remedy was to remove the battery totally, then reconnect the power lead and switch on, then when it had started again, reconnect the battery. It sounded ridiculous to me, but the thing was dead, so nothing to lose. What do you know? - it worked.

I'm so pleased _ I've had the ASUS for about five years now, and it's rarely switched off so I suppose I've had my money's worth, but I didn't like to think that I'd 'killed' it.

Fingers crossed that it doesn't happen again.

[Pluggy]

Totally depriving a machine of power is usually top of the list for me when I fix machines. Desktops you just switch it off at the mains socket or pull the power lead. Laptops you have to remove the battery as well. Computers are actually in a state close to standby in a television set when they are shut down, some parts that remain powered when shutdown can crash and they stay crashed until you reset them by pulling the power. A desktop machine will typically consume 3 or 4 watts of electricity when it's shut down and not isolated from electricity. A laptop a lot less, but its still burning the battery when its shut down. If you still have a desktop I'd recommend you isolate it when you're not using it. Laptops are a bit of a pain to take the battery out of.....

[Stanley]

The original Flying Machine that Doc and I built had a fault in that if you switched it off or pulled the plug (say if lightning was expected) the BIOS reverted to default settings and I had to reset all the parameters so it never got switched off and was permanently on stand-by. The FM2 doesn't have this problem and even when switched off there was still a green LED visible glowing in the back. Now I am on Talktalk I have reconfigured all the power connections and switch it off at the mains every time I stop work. Pluggy is right, the current reading on the leccy monitor falls about 10watts when I switch off but this includes the speakers, printer and monitor.
Very happy with the switch from Orange to Talktalk. Am watching bank statement carefully to make sure no payments are being taken for the old service.

[Tizer]

The current Long-Term Support version of Ubuntu Linux is about to expire, so the time is close for me to bite the bullet and go for the latest LTS version in 64-bit. I also should get an external hard drive to make back-ups while doing the new installation and would welcome any recommendation for one that works with Ubuntu (300-500 GB capacity needed). There's a Toshiba on Amazon for about £41 that has good reviews - but I don't know if all external drives work with Ubuntu or not....LINK

[Tripps]

"Fingers crossed that it doesn't happen again."

Well it did - next time I switched it off. Wouldn't recognise the operating system - catastrophe. I got the (unopened ) rescue disc which came with the PC about five years ago, and managed to reinstall windows. This was the original version, and did not do too much. It did not even see the wifi link, so there was no internet until I got an ethernet cable.
Anyway after loading about 125 windows updates, which took all of yesterday evening, it seems to be back where we started. Lost a lot of data, though some might turn up yet on the so called backup drives. I had the important stuff - genealogy records, and personal stuff on Treepad on a stick so no problems there thankfully.
Made me have a bit of a rethink on the internet entirely - since I still don't know why it all happened.
Only problem now is that the sound doesn't work - still working on that one.

One bit of good news though - Much to my surprise - I have finally got my refund on the Android tablet.

[Pluggy]

The current Long-Term Support version of Ubuntu Linux is about to expire, so the time is close for me to bite the bullet and go for the latest LTS version in 64-bit. I also should get an external hard drive to make back-ups while doing the new installation and would welcome any recommendation for one that works with Ubuntu (300-500 GB capacity needed). There's a Toshiba on Amazon for about £41 that has good reviews - but I don't know if all external drives work with Ubuntu or not....LINK

I shouldn't worry about a hard drive not working with Ubuntu. There is very little of anything that doesn't work with Linux these days. Hard drives are pretty much standard I have loads of them and they all work. Having used 12.04 for quite a while now, I wouldn't consider going back to 10.04. And as I've said before the change to 12.04 is of nothing as to compared with whats happening in Windo$e land. Its very conservative in comparison to the change to Windows 8 from Windows 7.

It breaks what I believe but it appears that even the 32 Bit version of Ubuntu 12.04 works with more than 4 GB of Ram. I have 6 in this machine and the 32 Bit appears to report and use it all.

[Pluggy]

My broadband has settled down to 16.4 Mb/s. Or twice as fast as I had with the old second line system. Phone remains clear as a bell.

[Pluggy]

"Fingers crossed that it doesn't happen again."

Well it did - next time I switched it off. Wouldn't recognise the operating system - catastrophe. I got the (unopened ) rescue disc which came with the PC about five years ago, and managed to reinstall windows. This was the original version, and did not do too much. It did not even see the wifi link, so there was no internet until I got an ethernet cable.
Anyway after loading about 125 windows updates, which took all of yesterday evening, it seems to be back where we started. Lost a lot of data, though some might turn up yet on the so called backup drives. I had the important stuff - genealogy records, and personal stuff on Treepad on a stick so no problems there thankfully.
Made me have a bit of a rethink on the internet entirely - since I still don't know why it all happened.
Only problem now is that the sound doesn't work - still working on that one.

One bit of good news though - Much to my surprise - I have finally got my refund on the Android tablet.

I'd be checking the integrity of the hard drive on the computer. It could well be a failing drive. If that's the case Windows will have re-mapped the bad sectors out with the re-installation, but more will appear if the drive is on it's way out. You need some software that will interrogate the SMART system of the hard drive. Ubuntu has it built in but you need something like this in Winodws : http://superuser.com/questions/29240/ho ... -windows-7

[Stanley]

Tiz, all I can say is that I got a Samsung Story 1tb external drive and it has performed well. I remember when we installed Ubuntu Pluggy watched it transfer about 80gb of data and commented how fast it was. The file system I saved was Windows but Ubuntu read it all perfectly. I used a new external drive to copy all my images to my mate Daniel. He sent the new drive and it was made for Apple. Very expensive but no faster than mine and he read the files OK on his Apple system. It looks as though data saving is just about bullet-proof.
I'm sorry to say I have no problems with 10.4 64 bit. Support still comes in. The question is Plugs, when do I upgrade to 12.4? Is it time you gave me a quote for coming round and doing the upgrade? I'm in all morning..... (Support local traders!)
By the way, you must have forgotten that my 10.4 32 bit used all 8gb of memory when we first installed it.

[Pluggy]

They'll kill support for 10.04 on it's 3rd anniversary, which will be towards the end of April this year. They've changed tack with 12.04 and the desktop version will be supported for 5 years. They've always supported the server versions of the LTS versions for 5 years, but they are doing it for all of them from 12.04 onwards. 10.04 will continue to work after April, but there will be no more updates. The non LTS versions are only supported for 18 months.

I'd let Tiz do his before you make a decision perhaps . If I'd had 6GB in this when I started with 12.04, ,I'd have put the 64 bit version on. If and when it decides it doesn't want to play with it all, I'll put the 64 bit version on.

I'll be reasonable for your work Stanley, as always.