Monthly Archive for November, 2006
Here in the office, I’ve been using Vonage Voice-over-IP Service for the past 18 months or so.I’ve found it to be reliable and of good quality, most of the time. Support leaves something to be desired (for instance, to close your account you need to call Vonage between 1pm and 11pm GMT – because the Support Team are based in the United States…)However we’ve recently moved back to a BT landline to take advantage of the many "free" Broadband offers – to use as backup to our 10mb Telewest line – and so there was little need to retain Vonage anymore.Imagine my surprise when we were charged £23.99 to disconnect from the service!That’s right – if you leave Vonage they charge you 3 months worth of line rental (£7.99/month) for the privelege!When you join Vonage you are supplied with a VoIP Router, so I guessed this £23.99 was refundable upon safe return of the Router to Vonage.Nope.So what has gone from a service I would happily recommend to anyone, now goes to a service I’d never recommend to anyone! 
The BCS has an interview on their web-site with Tony Roberts, chief executive of Computer Aid International, who are the most recognisable name in Computer recycling and re-use in the UK.I thought things had moved on in leaps and bounds with regards to recycling IT equipment, but the statistics show almost 2 million PC’s a year still end up in landfill. These aren’t old 286 and 386 machines that you’d be struggling to find a use for, these are Pentium III and Pentium IV PC’s, the sort that are probably sitting in the majority of most peoples son or daughters bedrooms right now. They are still being used for web-browsing, e-mail, Instant Messaging and Office – all of which PC’s of this standard are capable of being used for.So if we can still find a use for them here in the UK, imagine how valuable they are to deprived areas in Africa. The article goes on to describe what sorts of projects Computer Aid are undertaking with the equipment donated.If you’ve got any IT equipment that you want to recycle or re-use, rather than send to landfill, do get in touch and I’ll be happy to point you in the right direction!
Well it’s not often I go to a nightclub which is so hot!My brother and I arrived home in the early hours of this morning after going out to celebrate a friends birthday, with bad throats, smelling of smoke and both having lost our coats.A standard night out, you might say! Except it was because we were partying at Edwards No. 8, one of the oldest nightclubs in Birmingham, which burnt to the ground overnight!BBC News covers the story here.The fire alarms went off around 0130, we were herded outside (ironically we left by walking past the Gents Toilets, where the fire started) where we saw from the amount of smoke that was billowing from the building that this wasn’t a drill.Fire Engine after Fire Engine then arrived, and they are apparantly still trying to deal with the fire this morning. Nobody was seriously hurt although a number of people were suffering from smoke inhalation.My friends and I have been visiting Eddies since we were teenagers. I guess we can say we were there to it’s very end!Anyway, I’m off to recover. The smoke seems to have given me a pounding headache, dry throat, and a feeling of nausea. Yes, that’ll be the smoke…
I had an opportunity to watch a short video on Microsoft Forefront Client Security, the long awaited MS Enterprise Anti-Spyware and Anti-Virus package.Long-time readers of my blog will know that I’ve harped on about the lack of credible Enterprise Anti-Spyware packages many a time, so I’ve been waiting for news on Microsoft’s offering with anticipation.First impressions are that it looks impressive. The software integrates with Active Directory, and appears to have some really good reporting features.As it stands, I recommend AVG Anti-Virus to most of my SME customers for it’s good feature set and relatively low-cost, but don’t have any real Anti-Spyware preferences – certainly not for any centrally managed solutions. Therefore I’ll be keen on getting hold of a Beta copy of Forefront to put it through it’s paces as soon as possible.
I’ve mentioned OnSpeed before. It’s a service/software that works to compress data used across a dial-up or GPRS connection – reducing the amount of data downloaded, and speeding up the connection.I’ve used it on my laptop when in hotel rooms at 56kbps or worse, 9.6kbps GPRS – and it does it’s job well to make life a bit easier when you have a slow connection.Since upgrading my PDA to a Dell Axim x50v with Windows Mobile v5, I’ve been waiting for OnSpeed to upgrade their service to work with WM5. It was promised over a year ago, but still hasn’t arrived.So I was dissapointed when OnSpeed got back to my "Where is the WM5 version?" e-mail with the following response:-"Dear Sir/Madam, Unfortunately it is unlikely that support for Windows Mobile 5 devices will be added in the near future as there has been no date set for this.yours,ONSPEED Customer Services"As a WM5 PDA user – I think this is incredibly short-sighted of them. It’s not like the WM5 user base is going to go away now is it? Every new PDA that is released will be using WM5 or a later version!
So for now, OnSpeed remains a decent product – but for laptop or older model PDA users only.
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