Repair centres should diagnose first...

You'd think a repair centre for a big company like Sony would try and diagnose a problem with a mobile phone, even if it is as basic as turning the damn thing on.
This is the trouble i had, my phone wouldn't turn on, it was duly sent away to be repaired and returned to me in exactly the same condition. Oddly the online repair tracking facility stated that:

• Customer fault : fault not stated - no information provided
• Repair Centre Fault: No fault found
• Despatched back to customer (repaired) 

One would assume that the job/repair reference number would somewhere on their computer system point to what the problem was.

So it was sent back again this time with a bit of paper stating the problem, this time it when it returned it was fixed.
This time the tracking facility stated:

• Customer fault :  electrical - no switch on/off
• Repair Centre Fault: No fault found
• Despatched Back to Customer (Repaired) 

Next time try the IT cliché  turn it off and turn it back on again, if it won't turn on find out why!

To give Sony credit there were helpful in setting up the returns etc. it was even a freepost address that i had to use...

Why do ISP's make things complicated?

So a colleague has Virgin cable and was upgraded to 50Mbps, they sent him a new cable modem.
He lives at number 46, Yodel, the delivery company (was DHL) tried to deliver it to number 48...

4 times...

5th time lucky.

Then the Virgin engineers came to set it up, got the wired network working to the desktop but they couldn't get the 3 laptops to connect via wireless.
One of these laptops had built in wireless and the solution was to supply it with a Virgin branded, NetGear USB dongle.

I go around and look at the set-up and basically its a rather snazzy NetGear router which has been bastardised by Virgin.
It doesn't help that the laptops could see the new router but refused to connect to it without using the Virgin Media Wireless Manager.
Also I don't think think that having WPS enabled was helping the situation.
Set the router up to use WPA2 and the 2 old laptops with USB dongles eventually got connected, brill now to do the same on new laptop with built in, but no it wouldn't connect.
Reset the router to automatically use an appropriate WPA and finally the last laptop connects, even if it has automatically chosen WPA instead of WPA2.
By this time I'd had enough and thought, stuff it, it's working now.

I'm 100% convinced that had an off the shelf NetGear router been supplied with easy step by step instructions it would have been set-up in a fraction of the time.
I know that ISP's customise their router with the view of making it "Plug & Play" and lessening the chance of the customer messing things up, but when it doesn't work and their own engineers can't solve it it makes it difficult for everyone else!

For this reason I still use my old faithful NetGear for my internet and refuse to use my O2 Wireless Box as my main router, I do now have my O2 Box as a secondary router because it has USB ports and can use a USB drive/stick as a basic NAS!

Bye-bye

Edward has now learnt how to say bye-bye.
Unfortunately when trying to get him to say "Hi" he'll look up at the ceiling!

Ignorance...

One thing that gets my goat is inaccurate computer reviews.
For example in this weeks Shortlist (Free magazine handed out in Birmingham and other big cities)
they reviewed a Toshiba A665 laptop:

"The Intel i7 is the most powerful processor you can buy and uses Hyper-Threading to boost the power, when necessary, to a scorching 2.93GHz."

While it is true that the processor does indeed have a function to boost CPU speed to 2.93GHz this function is called Turboboost, Hyper-Threading is a feature that make one physical CPU core appear as 2 virtual cores.