Virgin Media Contracts

I was recently advised by some friends off www.adslguide.org that new legislation from Ofcom state that any service provider can only charge u a maximum of £120 if you decide to end a contract early [within 12 months] minus your present bill :)

I was also told that VM are offering new & existing customers their new flagship 50mb product at a reduced price of £28 a month excluding £50 installation fee's and a new 12 month contract.

This tempting offer must simply point at the fact the new flagship product will shortly be the attention of traffic shaping though on a different network to existing broadband products I find this quite baffling, personally I have felt traffic shaping to be a massive hindrance. For example whilst during the day I need to download a Linux distro I have to wait 5x times longer than usual due to being capped though I have not hit my download limit, this was more severe on the 20mb product hence why i downgraded and new 12 month contract. I am only 6 months away now from reaching the end of the contract and I might be tempted to try the 21CN ADSL2 products on offer, I was a trialist last year for entanet's 21cn product and I must admit I was happy with the latency and sync speeds, I was syncing at 19MB with an attenuation of 17DB and a 10DB SNR level so further scope for tweaks

anyway the initial purpose of this blog was to clarify how upset I am at how Virgin media automatically reset 12 months contracts if you decide to downgrade or upgrade your package deal, I think this tactic was to offset the apparent loses at the new Ofcom ruling imo and since Telewest merged with NTL and were bought out by Virgin they have always had the same attitude, f*ck existing customers, we will focus on capturing new customers. Telewest were probbably the best ISP [if u had cable in the area]back in the old days with no traffic shaping, high service levels and excellent latency for gaming

Computer Freezing a computer fault ?

I was called out a week or so ago to a customer who had previously taken her computer to a so called expert who advised her that the reason behind her computer problems [computer would lock up after a minute or so after booting or under stress conditions] was due to heat and that she had fan problems and suggested her computer needed replacing or along those lines

within a few minutes of investigation i noticed that infact the computer was operating fine, no evidence of fan failure or noisy bearings, HD seemed to be fine with no corruption neither was the computer freezing, XP reported no software problems nor hardware problems, my suspicions then moved from software to a possible hardware fault, as the computer was only a few years old the bios offered the facility to show realtime voltage and temps, once again the temps were fine and that associated with a 478 celeron, voltages seemed a bit low but hardly under the ATX thresholds, now to eliminate any further problems i tested the ram within a dos environment and it came back clear so i then went to stress test hardware components within xp and bingo, as soon as cpu usage hit 100% the computer locked up, i tried again and it locked up immediately

To finish this article a new PSU and an hour later the computer was operating stable, she was charged 50% less than her previous quote, it always helps to get a second opinion and unfortunately the likes of PC world give PC repair a very expensive name