Sadly I was unsurprised to read in PCW's July 2005 issue about the poor customer service experienced by two of your readers, and even less surprised that PCW's  intervention resulted in a happy ending - it's a shame that some companies don't  appear to value their customers until there's a risk of bad publicity. 

However, as  cynical as I've become, I have recently been pleasantly surprised by the quality  of service I received from HP after buying a new Media Center PC. While it would  be preferable to receive a system without any faults HP has been quick to  resolve every issue I have encountered and have done so each time with courtesy  and consideration, treating me as a valued customer.

The benefits to HP in  dealing with customers in this way are plain to see - here I am writing praise  for a company I would previously have assumed to be as poor on customer service as any other. And the icing on the cake... I paid 35% less than the high street price by buying directly from HP via their Ebay auctions.

Tom  Calverley

Posted by on May 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (5)

After reading your feature on Broadband in the July issue I decided to try and increase my connection speed. My BT Openworld  connection has a theoretical speed of 2.2Mbits/sec, but my actual download speed  reported by http://www.techdepot.com/pro/speed.asp?rd=1 was  around 1Mbits/sec. I downloaded the Dr TCP utility mentioned in the article and used it to double my TCP Receive Window ( RWIN ) from 17520 to 35040. After rebooting I found that my speed had increased to around 1.7Mbits/sec!!!

I then decided to look through BT Openworld help to see if I could find any advice on setting up my computer for optimum broadband speed. I could find no advice on settings to increase speed and a search for "TCP receive window" and "RWIN" yielded no results. Surely it couldn't be that BT would prefer their customers not to be able to use their broadband connection at the fastest speed?

Chris Hawkes

Posted by on May 27, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (21)

I am against illegal copying of music. I do believe it deprives artists of income. The fact that it deprives the fat cat record executives of all their 'pleasures' I do not see as a problem. However these executives will not sign up new acts unless they are making good money out of established acts.

These same executives do the debate no favours with their alarmist figures. I believe they probably assume that every person who downloads is doing so instead of buying the CD. How do they calculate how many people download what? If they have the method of detecting music travelling the net then they could surely stop it. I suspect they use extrapolation. This makes their loss figures doubly dubious.

Posted by on May 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (61)

I need you to finally answer a question that me and my mate Tarquin have been arguing down the pub for ages and ages.

Who do you think would win a hypothetical fight between Bill Gates and Rolf Harris?

I would be grateful to hear your theories.

Many Thanks

Barry Barron

We reckon it's no contest: if Bill could survive Rolf's opening Stylophone attack, he'd bore Rolf to death in a matter of seconds..

Posted by on May 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Next time you talk to the DVD film industry, would you tell them that putting 15 mins of advertsing in front of a film and disabling the ability to FF through it is the best reason I can think of for buying a pirate DVD.

My nine year old grandson likes to go to the cinema, primarily because I get mugged for a few mins in the games arcade, popcorn, drink, Macdonalds & a comic. But, unlike me, he likes watching the films again & again on VHS. Now he's moved to DVD.

Until recently I've always found ways around the "this feature is disabled" screen, but the latest purchase defied my best efforts. After struggling to cut to the chase my grandson turned to me and said "I'll be as old as you by the time the film starts, grandad".

And of course he'll get this EVERY time he watches the goddam film.

Now I could copy the entire thing to a hard drive, and either edit it to disable the disabling (if you see what I mean), or get a bit more clever & remove the ads completely. Either of which could find me in court, even though I bought the real thing.

Or I could avoid paying £15 for the DVD, a blank DVD-R, and an evening's effort, and pay £5 to the guy who provides knockoffs with no ads. Preview copies or direct-from-the-industry full spec pirates seem to be the order of the day.

Even at full retail price, the knockoff would be more attractive because it is more convenient than the real thing. How crazy is that?

It's not about the price. I'll pay the full price BUT I just want the film, not video SPAM.

David Reynolds

Posted by Rob Jones on May 17, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (2)

My motherboard has just decided to lose the functionality of all its USB ports.  I had plugged in a Freecom portable hard drive, the PC froze, and on reboot, none of the USB ports would work.  After much head scratching, driver and BIOS updating, it soon became obvious that the ports were dead. 

Posted by on May 16, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (72)

I purchased a copy of your magazine to read while on holiday. I was disappointed to see that you had published a flame from an anti-Windows user. I am not sure what your point is, but surely you are not trying to say that more idiots run Linux than run Windows? I suggest everyone ignores them and hopes they go away.

Anyway I thought I would write in to let you know what I would like from the magazine, which would make me buy it more.

Hardware reviews should give the state of the drivers in Linux - none, Binary only, or open source. Also an indication of whether the hardware is crippled by running an open source driver, and how open the specifications are if the open source driver does not exist or is incomplete.

I suspect with some thought some visual icons could be developed so this does not take up much space in the mag. This is very important for anyone who uses Linux at all on their PC, or even for someone who thinks they may want to use it in the future.

Posted by on May 10, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Many thanks for the Windows articles in the April, May and June issues; namely Top 100 Freeware Programmes, 110 Windows Utilites and Windows Secrets respectively.

Could you sometimes nod in the direction of those, like me, who have been misguided enough to buy a WinXP computer from a 'big name builder' who installs an OEM version of the OS and sends it out with only a hidden 'recovery partition' and a recovery disc?

My recovery disc is shrink wrapped and bears the message that it must only be used after obtaining clearance from the system builder - presumably ignoring this instruction invalidates the warranty? They have also passworded the hidden Administrator account!

The difficulty this makes can be illustrated with trying to load ntbackup into XP Home; one does not have a WinXP disc from which to pull it. Why should we pay twice for the OS by having to buying a retail version?

Making an up to date backup of the OS for recovery purposes is clearly better than having to use a seriously compromised version which then requires you to spend ages downloading all the patches issued in the meantime and so on.

Please can you add to the pressure on system builders (and Microsoft) to only preload full versions of the OS intended for private use as against business customers and in all cases to include the disc.

Chis Cox

Posted by Rob Jones on May 6, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3)

Hi
Two things:
Firstly, what's all the fuss about multiprocessors?  AMD and Intel are bringing out dual processors. Surprise, surprise! Some years  ago you interviewed Sir Clive Sinclair. He said something along the line of that  the race for faster and faster processors is going down a blind alley. What they  should be doing is going for low cost multiprocessor systems. This was around  five years ago I think, it would be interesting if you could find the  article.

Secondly, in the numerous reviews on multimedia  gadgets I've yet to see a review of the Vivitar DVR-390H. As well as playing  videos, music etc, it also has a detachable 3.1megapixel stills camera and an Mpeg4 video  camera. It's a great bit of kit I bought for my wife and she uses it almost  daily. The only fault with it is that it doesn't have a built in microphone.  Otherwise, well done Vivitar!

Thanks for a great mag. I've still got the first  six mags of PCW! I don't know why I still keep them.

Keep up the good work.

Ed Peers

Posted by on May 4, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1)

I read your article on high definition (HD) TV with interest and would point out that just because your display device is HDCP aware doesn't mean it will work.

I have a Toshiba (aka Infocus) MT8 DLP projector with all the latest firmware that supports HDMI/HDCP. When I replaced my DVD player I spent a little more and opted for the new Panasonic DVD-S97 player that also has HDMI and even Faroudja DCDi. 'Wow!' I thought 'this is going to be great'.

Plugged it all in... nothing. No signal. The DVD player reported "HDMI connection  error".

I spent months trying to get it working and eventually gave up and reverted to analog  component. I tried each of my components with a friend's setup - and  each worked. I sent both the player and projector back to Toshiba who said it all worked fine - but then wouldn't/couldn't tell me what cable they used.

To make it  worse, the average hi-fi shop salesman knows nothing about digital technology and the frequent misadvice and sometimes even plain B/S is hard to believe.

In this case I suspect that like all standards, there are different levels of conformance between implementations and that my DVD player and PJ simply weren't compatible.

Darran  Potter

Posted by Rob Jones on May 3, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)