I advised my aunt to buy an Acer Aspire laptop almost a year back. I must say I am very satisfied with the bang per buck her budget bought her, and am impressed with many of the tiny convenience features Acer had built in to the initial software setup process.

Recently, a system file went missing or got corrupted. Following instructions, I inserted the rescue disk whose instructions which gave me the impression that it would allow me to recover or replace
the missing file without requiring a full restore. Press "C" for continue, and many minutes later, a very nicely packaged recovery program that never gives you an option to bail out, invites you to
customise the copy of Windows that has been copied on to your freshly wiped main partition....

I thank my geeky stars that I had painstakingly moved my aunt's My Documents folder structure and her email to the cryptically named "Acer Data" partition that had been spared by the zealous recovery tool. Thanks to this I "only" had to reinstall all her applications, antivirus, bookmarks, and change the out-of-the-box Windows settings that common sense call for.

Now, I had been aware that many branded machines are shipped with "recovery" versions of Windows. I may even have been a little too cavalier when I hit that fateful "C" button. But when big name companies can take the pains to add on so many post-Windows-setup customisations to change wallpaper and screensavers to branded nonsense, install utilities, all straight out of the box and post-recovery, and even have the sense to create a separate partition that is NOT wiped by the highly restrictive "recovery" routine..

Surely they could also move the standard user data folders to other partitions too? Ideally, of course, the "recovery" CD should first give the user an option to boot in to the very handy recovery shell
(come on, it's part of the OS isn't it??) that provides all the tools necessary to recover from such file corruptions without resorting to the Nuclear Option.

Charitha Ratwatte (Jnr)

Posted by on February 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Some time back my ISP offered an increased speed of 2MB for a reduction to the monthly charge.

That was pleasant news but I was dismayed to find that my phone line would not support a speed of more than 1MB.

I asked BT the reason for the restriction and when they would improve the line. The letter was ignored as was a further letter.

I phoned the BT helpline. In answer to my question there was a pregnant silence after which I was told that my line was restricted to a broadband speed of 1MB – which had I pointed out. 

They directed me to the BT web site and said that there was no-one available to answer my questions.

I emailed my ISP and asked if they could direct me to an individual or office in BT who could give me an answer.

They replied: "Unfortunately at the moment we have not come across a way to put any more pressure on BT than we are already to improve most exchanges so that more users overall are able to achieve higher connection speeds.

"At the moment it is difficult to apply any kind of pressure on BT to improve things especially on an individual case.”

You feel that BT could do a super job if only customers would leave them alone. Perhaps they would rather I went to cable. No one at BT wants to give me an answer and the ISP looks as if they've had a skinful too.

Mike Goodwin

Posted by Rob Jones on February 15, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (477)

I have worked in software development for 16 years. The companies I've worked for have had development processes ranging from rigorous to plain cavalier; however, in all of them someone has at least thought about whether the application would work under restricted logins.

So why is it that a number of software packages I've recently bought refuse to work under anything less than the administrator login? It's one thing needing admin rights to install software, but to run it?

This just seems sloppy to me, and doesn't bode well for the quality of the software. Windows has supported multiple users for well over a decade now, and we are constantly bombarded by viruses and spyware only too happy to take advantage of a powerful login, so you would think that  some effort would be made to test under a restricted user.

I have vowed to return the next piece of software that does this, much to my children's dismay as it's mostly their games that are the offenders.

By the way, pet hate number 1? Progress bars that don't indicate progress. Grrr!! 

Kevin Roche

Posted by Rob Jones on February 3, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I thought you might like to know about my reasons for leaving Tiscali.

Some months ago, the service was dreadful, slow, intermittent and contacts complained that I hadn't answered emails that I hadn't even received. The ticker tape on Tiscali's website said "All aspects of the Tiscali service are fully operational. No faults have been reported".

I reported the fault and waited some hours. Then I rang support (and hung on for 20 minutes) and was eventually told they had problems with their mail servers, so there was a backlog on emails.

"Your website says no faults have been reported. I reported a fault earlier," I said.

"That's not a fault, it's an issue that has been logged and we're dealing with it."

"But your website's dials all show 100% operability of your servers," I relied.

"That's correct," he said, "we are operating 100% because all emails will get through, there just may be a delay of 24 hours."

"But that's not 100%," I pointed out.

"Yes it is," Tiscali replied.

I have two problems with this: first is the apparent dishonesty of the website which permanently announces that it is running a perfect service when it is not.

The second is that it is unhelpful - I spent hours trying to "fix" the problem, going through my manuals and help files, checking the network settings, rebooting.

If the website had said there may be a 24-hour delay in getting emails as Tiscali was trying to fix a problem with its mail servers, that would have been helpful and saved my time. In fact I didn't get all my emails.

At the moment the service keeps going down for a few minutes. I rang their support desk and was told on three occasions by the automated answering service that they were abnormally busy, and "please call back later".

Their website said they had problems with various phone numbers for their help desk. Eh? An international communications company, and the phones have gone down?

Enough is enough, I am leaving Tiscali, fed up with indifferent support and shrinking bandwidth.

Another aspect to this is the IT industry's use of the term "issue" when they really mean mistake or fault.

As a lawyer, if a client accused me of professional negligence because of a mistake I'd made, how would it sound if I said, "it's not a mistake, it's just an issue which I am looking into. Next time you'll get a normal service."

Doesn't sound too convincing, does it?

Richard Stephenson

Posted by Rob Jones on February 2, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (24)