Starting off with Vista; those of you with this Operating System would be advised to download the Service Pack from www.microsoft.com or via Windows Update as along with fixing hundreds of little bugs [...]]]> We have two things to discuss today; Vista Service Pack 2 and cheap broadband.

Starting off with Vista; those of you with this Operating System would be advised to download the Service Pack from www.microsoft.com or via Windows Update as along with fixing hundreds of little bugs and glitches it also adds a number of new features. Most notable changes include support for Via Technologies new Nano 64-Bit CPU, support for Bluetooth 2.1, BluRay writing directly from the Operating System and improved performance for WiFi connections.

This update is 348mb in size meaning that you would really need to be on a broadband connection to consider the download; this leads me neatly on to my next point.

I was contacted this week by a reader who was still using a dial up connection. I had assumed that this hardcore group of users had disbanded and joined the 21^st century but it appears that I was mistaken. Try as I might, I cannot rationalise in my own head why someone would still be using dial-up; it’s slow, temperamental, ties up your phone line, and if you use it for more than a handful of minutes a week it can actually work out quite costly.

In order to reach out to these users (and indeed anyone currently on an overpriced broadband package) I thought it prudent to overview the cheapest broadband packages on the market; these represent a perfect stepping stone from dial-up. The following recommendations are suited primarily to light Internet users and as such I would not recommend them for intensive use such as gaming or heavy downloading.

Sky TV – Sky TV customers can get free 2Mbps Broadband with a 2GB usage limit when they also subscribe to Sky Talk (the most basic of which is free) for the phone calls. Of course you still have to pay your line rental to BT, as you would with dial up. While 2GB isn’t a particularly large bandwidth limit it will satisfy most home users and is in excess of what could be feasibly downloaded via dial-up in a month.

Talk Talk – Talk Talk is £6.49 a month in addition to your usual line rental and includes 8GB Broadband, a 40GB usage limit, free local calls and free national weekend and evening calls. The company has had a fair amount of bad press over the last couple of years mainly due to its unprecedented growth since its incorporation in 2003 but things seemed to have improved of late. If the planned merger with Tiscali goes ahead, Talk Talk will have become the largest residential broadband provider in the UK.

Tiscali – For £14.99 a month including your monthly line rental you can get up to 8GB broadband and unlimited free weekend calls. As BT would usually charge you around £12 for your line rental you are essentially getting a capable broadband package for less than £3 a month.

PlusNet – If you don’t fancy the idea of having your telephone calls handled by your broadband provider, the PlusNet Value package at £5.99 a month is an extremely competitive standalone package. With speeds up to 8Mbps, a 10GB daily download limit and an unlimited evening download limit the PlusNet deal is also surprisingly fully featured.

Before committing to a broadband package it might be an idea to first check out www.moneysupermarket.com to compare a number of other deals on the market. Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) don’t levy a set of charge all of them will provide the equipment you require and many of them will even chuck in a free wireless router; there really is no reason to stick with dial-up.

This week the following question has prompted me to revise and republish an article that I printed last year as I believe that the program I recommend should still be one that all users have installed on their machine.

A question I [...]]]>

This week the following question has prompted me to revise and republish an article that I printed last year as I believe that the program I recommend should still be one that all users have installed on their machine.

A question I have been asked recently about Broadband & Premium phone number pop-ups; is there anyway of telling whether a pop-up during surfing or of inadvertently wandering on to a Premium site can be avoided. The reason for me asking is of course obvious as I want to avoid the kids, Granny etc running up my phone bill unbeknown to me. This of course can happen on both broadband & Dialup connection.

Tom Blakesley, via E-mail

Before we start I think it is quite important to note that this issue would not affect broadband; there is no way that a broadband modem can ‘dial out’ as such. Although it is true that when using ADSL windows does have to create a dial up connection this is more a placebo effect to allow it to verify your user name and password – The broadband link is always active and your modem cannot dial another number; premium rate or otherwise.

The below program that I am about to recommend isn’t a solution to your problem because as far as I am aware there is no ‘one fits all’ solution to these problems caused by rogue programs although Windows XP service pack 2 does make it harder for these things to install themselves without your permission. Instead it is a utility that can be used to locate already installed programs such as these and potentially avoid your machine becoming infected in the first instance.

It has to be said that quite a common complaint submitted by readers is intrusive software which often installs itself onto their systems with no easy way to remove it; whether it dials out premium rate numbers or not. Quite often the software contains questionable content such as pornographic links and it can be quite concerning if the computer is shared with other members of the family as there is often no way to delete the links that have been created. A piece of software that I’ve always found useful in all these instances is ‘SpyBot Search & Destroy’ which can be downloaded free of charge from http://security.kolla.de

Once you’ve started the program you should scan your system for spyware & adware which takes a couple of minutes to complete and the program then displays a list of the problems that it found on your system along with the option to automatically repair them. It’s surprising how much rubbish many of you will have running in the background constantly as I keep a regularly clean out junk applications and the program managed to detect at least a dozen or so unwanted applications installed on my hard drive. By removing them you can free up valuable system resources and also make your computer slightly more pleasant to use and an important point to note is that the software does make a backup as it goes along so if you find that certain programs won’t work anymore then you can always restore your system to how it was previously. Once you’ve cleaned out all the rubbish which has then the program has the option to immunise your system which installs preventative measures to help prevent rouge software from installing itself again.

If you head to http://security.kolla.de/ then the file is 3.5Mg in size so even on a 56k connection it should only take 10 minutes or so to download and the best news is that it’s completely free of charge although the author does ask for a donation if you find it. To conclude, one of the most annoying areas of the modern Internet is the large number of programmers on the Internet who believe that it is acceptable to install useless software on to your computer without your permission and without any easy way to uninstall just so they can make some quick money. Much of this software exposes you to constant pop up advertising without your permission, tracks your browsing habits or in the case of Toms concern above it can actually end up costing you money; personally I believe that any program which tries to kerb this abuse has to be worth installing.

Regular reader Jean Birkett e-mailed me this week commenting on the fact that Tiscali Broadband had now put their prices down and asked me since her modem was currently trundling along at 26.4kbps was it worth her now upgrading to broadband? Although I replied to her with a simple ‘yes’ [...]]]>

Regular reader Jean Birkett e-mailed me this week commenting on the fact that Tiscali Broadband had now put their prices down and asked me since her modem was currently trundling along at 26.4kbps was it worth her now upgrading to broadband? Although I replied to her with a simple ‘yes’ I thought that since I hadn’t touched on the subject of Broadband for a while I would elaborate on this slightly to make an entire article out of my reply.

Broadband in the UK has been catching on quite nicely over the past couple of years with exchanges being activated left, right and centre as well as the price coming down to a level that means anyone who uses the Internet on a semi-regular basis can rationalise paying it. Tiscali have been a name that have kept coming up over the past few months and as they do seem to be very competitively priced I’m going to be focusing my article on them this week but of course there are many different providers that you can choose from and of course I’d like to also state that I’m not a Tiscali customer myself so I’m not endorsing this product in any way!

Now that the disclaimer out of the way, I’ll start by mentioning the new product that Tiscali have on the market; a 150kbps service that although is only around a third of the speed of conventional broadband it is still around 3 times faster than a standard modem and weighs in at only £15.99 a month. To be honest, it’s difficult to see how so many people are still paying £15.99 for AOL Anytime which consists of a standard dial up connection when for the same price they could have 150kbps Broadband which would give them 3 times the speed and the ability to use the phone at the same time.

If the 150kpbs service isn’t fast enough for you they also have 5 times faster available at £19.99 and 10 times faster at £24.99 and all the packages above include a free modem although you do have to pay £25 set up for the package which is 5 times (256kpbs) the speed of a conventional modem.

Bizarrely they also have a 10 times faster package available at £19.99 but you’re limited to 50 hours surfing before you start paying 2p a minute although I’m not even going to rationalise this product by talking about it as it’s an utterly stupid idea; Broadband was pioneered to be always on so what a weird way to charge you.

People keep saying to me that they’ve held off buying Broadband until the price comes down but I really don’t think that you can complain when the cost of Broadband through a company such as Tiscali is now the same cost as unlimited 56k dial up through one of the major suppliers such as AOL. Think of the additional benefits such as the ability to use the phone at the same time as using the Internet and as long as you live in a broadband enabled area, you really have no excuse not to upgrade. Tiscali can be contacted by calling 0800 107 9000 or by heading to www.tiscali.co.uk.

As a Blueyonder customer myself I would like to make a comment to their marketing department (as I know they read this) that their service is now quite overpriced when faced against this tough new competition and perhaps it would be an idea to reduce their prices slightly?

This week I’ll again spend a bit of time answering a selection of readers’ questions in the hope that I can resolve some of your most common problems.

I have been following your Click column in the Herald Express [...]]]>

This week I’ll again spend a bit of time answering a selection of readers’ questions in the hope that I can resolve some of your most common problems.

I have been following your Click column in the Herald Express for some time and find it useful, being very new to Windows, etc.  I followed your recent instructions on updating and managed to update most of our programs although, I cannot download DirectX 8.1 upgrade; it takes almost an hour and every time I try (and I have tried many times this last week) I lose the connection somewhere during the download time.  We have Freeserve Anytime.

As you know, when the connection breaks you have to go back to the beginning of the download again.  Can you please advise?

Alick Lavers, via e-mail

This is a common problem for many people who use the Internet which can be caused for a number of reasons:

i. Most common is that your service provider disconnects you automatically after a certain duration online (usually around 2 hours) in an attempt to try and reduce the amount of time that you spend on their lines. This practice, in my opinion is pretty pointless as it is possible to tell Windows to automatically redial if the line is dropped (found in the properties menu of the dial up networking connection you are using) and ultimately just results in many infuriated customers who are forced to retry their downloads a number of times and therefore actually increasing the overall time spent online.

ii. Although this is not applicable in your case, many people find that they are disconnected automatically by Windows after a certain idle time online. This is good if you are using a connection which requires you to pay call charges then if you forget to log off, the computer can do it for you, however many people will find that they have no use for this feature and so may like to turn it off. To do this, go to the properties menu for your dial up connection and make sure ‘Idle time before hanging up’ is set to ‘never’.

iii. Noise on the line, an incorrectly configured modem or erroneous data being received from your service provider can sometimes trigger random disconnections. This is probably the most difficult problem for me to diagnose for you but since you seem to become disconnected at different points through-out the download then I would suggest that this may be the cause.

What speed do you connect at? If it is over 46kbps or so then I’d say that your line is okay, if not then you’re probably best off getting your line diagnosed by BT which they can do for free. Update your modem drivers as well, even if this is not the root of the problem it is something you should do regularly anyway.

I would suggest in the meantime that you download and install a copy of Go!Zilla which is available for free from www.gozilla.com. This program is one of the most popular download managers available and comes with several good features, most notably the ability to resume broken downloads so that if you get disconnected half way through downloading then you can simply reconnect and continue your transfer.

Install the program, point your browser towards www.microsoft.com/directx/, locate correct version of DirectX and then when you click on the link it should automatically start to download in Go!Zilla. If you then get disconnected, just instruct Go!Zilla to resume the file download from where it left off.

I would suggest that all readers who use the Internet a moderate amount should get hold of the latest version of their modem drivers and also a free copy of Go!Zilla even if you are not currently experiencing any problems. The program has many features which you should find useful and combined with updated modem drivers should allow you to squeeze every last drop of performance out of your connection.

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