Just to be fair, if the work is being done in specific geographical areas, then it's a Telecoms issue rather than the ISP's, and may well be happening at short notice; an analogy would be that while railway maintenance engineering is planned and notified in advance, if there's an unforeseen circumstance such as a landslide, crash or vandalism, then there's no way advance warning can be given. Chances are that it will affect all providers, too, in just the same way that work on the track affects all the train companies who use it. 

It amuses me that so many images of people 'taking it out on their computer' shows them smashing the monitor and the keyboard while the actual computer is under the desk 


Photobucket seems to be doing maintenance which hopefully explains some images from our archived site are currently (temporarily??) not showing

Why are my ears pointed? 

Well, the latest from this neck of the woods is that the PW Virgin Broadband is well and truly buglered - long conversations last night with Virgin operatives in diverse exotic locations (well, Mumbai and Llansamlet) revealed that, in addition to the frequent outages lately, I have a problem in the set-top box.  Fasolt and Fafner are booked to come and fix it tomorrow afternoon.

Some of the conversations were almost surreal (especially at 25p per minute*):

Virgin operative:  How do you connect your computer to the set-top box?

Me: Through a router

VO:  Can you plug the computer into the box direct?

Me: No, it's in a different part of the house.  That's why I use a router.

VO: This makes things awkward.  Can you move your computer?

Me:  No, not while I'm on hold on a premium-rate helpline I can't.

VO:  Well we need to check whether the problem is in the router.

Me:  It isn't.  The router is working normally and the PC is telling me it has a connection.

VO: Well I need you to be sitting at your computer.  Can you call back on your mobile?

Me:  This is a premium-rate helpline, and we're trying to sort out your failure to deliver a service.  Why can't you call me on my mobile?

VO:  We're not really supposed to do that.

Me:  Can I speak to a supervisor?

VO:  OK, in your case I'll make a special exception.

[VO calls back on mobile.  By this time I am seated at the computer in other rooom]

VO:  Good.  Fine.  Can you see the set-top box?

 

*to be fair, once they established that the fault was in their kit they said they'd waive the cost of the call

I reported elsewhere and mentioned on this thread yonks ago that Internet Explorer was giving me jip. I'd have two pages/tabs open, and often if I clicked a link e.g. a sounclip or when I was using paypal, all the internt pages would freeze and eventually on the top blue bit it would say (Not responding) Ctrl-Alt-Delete closed all the webpages

This went on for weeks around and after Christmas, always scared to reset anything....

But I found this from the IE toolbar:

Tools > Internet Options > Advanced and at the bottom it offers Reset
Internet Explorer Settings and lists the data that you will lose.

So I went ahead, and yippee the problem has gone away.

Nothing essential was lost, just toolbars and the pull-down list of recently visited pages. I've only installed minimum toolbars, just the Yahoo, not additional ones like Google etc as I suspect all that stuff up there was the cause. So trouble free surfing returns 

The very, very nice man from Virgin has just left and broadband has been restored - I've got a new set-top box too.

Now I can at last listen to Tuesday's Performance on Three ....

Apologies if this has already been mentioned on this thread, but one very useful thing the BT helpline people can do is control and fix your computer from wherever they are in India. It's quite odd watching someone opening folders etc on your computer while you just watch. You can terminate it at any time if you wish and you have to give permission in the first place.