Because geek is cool and clever

A nice little earner February 28, 2009

Sometimes this column gives tips; sometimes this column gives advice; and rarely this column gives a resounding warning that readers will fail to heed at their peril.

Ladies and gentlemen, today we find ourselves at the latter stage. This is Def Con Three. I implore you to avoid all distractions and to fully digest the following statement.

Do not sign up to Virgin Media’s broadband service.

What follows is more than a personal whinge about a one-off experience. I have it from the horse’s mouth that the company is continuing to sign people up for a service it knows it cannot hope to provide. It will take your money and leave you wanting.

In my book that’s called a scam.

Here’s what is happening. Virgin Media is currently engaged in an aggressive advertising campaign in Oxford and elsewhere where it is praising fibre optic cabling and its newly available 50Mbps broadband service. As you might expect from such a campaign, it is receiving a significant number of new customers.

The cable modem that Virgin installs in your house works by making a physical connection between itself and Virgin’s nearest data exchange. These exchanges contain things called Universal Broadband Routers (UBR) which are, in turn, connected directly to the internet.

Each UBR has a maximum capacity which you can think of just like the router in your house. The more computers that connect to it, the slower the connection becomes for each of those computers.

Virgin Media is taking on more customers than it has UBRs to support them, making internet access very much slower than promised or, at certain times, non-existent.

My ‘up to’ 20Mbps line was installed last Wednesday and over four days my connection fluctuated around the 2Mbps level. Engineers came and went before finally admitting the problem with the oversubscribed UBRs. Virgin itself will give no date for when more UBRs will be introduced, thus increasing the capacity.

When accounts are placed the company does not check the current capacity on the line, preferring to just keep adding more and more people to it and taking £30 or £50 a month for a service it likely cannot provide.

My account is now cancelled and Virgin Media won’t get a penny of my money. I will also be contacted Trading Standards.

The ‘nipple’ mouse. Just say no. February 28, 2009

Anyone who knows my computing habits will tell you that I’m a mouse fiend. It’s like I’m on some endless quest to find the perfect desktop companion – and it’s a quest that is proving very difficult to achieve.

As a Mac user, my primary choice of mouse was, of course, the Apple Mighty Mouse. This sleek, white, flat device was ergonomically dreadful (though not quite in the same league as the notorious ‘puck’ round mouse that Apple introduced with the very first Mac) and introduced the little nipple trackball on the top.

We’ve long had mice with an up and down scroll wheel and more recently we’ve seen left to right clicking of that wheel and so it surely wasn’t long before we got a multi-directional trackball perched atop our desktop rodent.

Great. Except they don’t work.

If a speck of dust, finger grease (look, we all have it, OK?) or the minutest amount of dirty gets within the ball enclosure, it stops the thing from working – it just free-wheels uselessly around without having any effect on the screen cursor. I’ve lost count of the number of alcohol wipes I’ve used on the thing. They clean it for about eight seconds before a micro-organism works its way back in and then its slippy slidey time once again.

Useless.

I stuck with the Mighty Mouse for far longer than I should’ve before throwing it into a box where it will live out the rest of its days.

I then embarked on testing a string of alternative wireless mice, plumping ultimately for Microsoft’s terrific Arc Mouse.

I love this thing. It’s light, compact and folds away if I want to pop it in my laptop bag for the day. In fact I liked it so much that I started using it with the other computer on my desk and eventually didn’t want to give it back to the Mac. It became clear I needed another new mouse.

Foolish simpleton that I appear to be, I popped into PC World as I was passing one day and had a look at their selection of mice. I’d normally stay clear from actually purchasing from that particular fine shop given their dramatically inflated prices and some staggeringly bad customer service I once experienced, but I needed a new mouse and my eye fell on the Kensington Blade (pictured) because it looked stylish.

It also had the trackball nipple which I unforgivably overlooked, assuming it would be OK.

I must learn to keep my assumptions in careful check because this thing is as bad as the Mighty Mouse that came and went before it. It simply doesn’t work and I’m back to free-wheeling hell once more.

So I need yet another new mouse. I’d love to get another Microsoft Arc but I’m worried that two of them will interfere with each other. Maybe I’ll have a quick trawl of the web and see if that would, indeed, be the case.

I really should flog off some of this old abandoned hardware but I don’t really have the heart to submit some other poor unsuspecting soul to the frustration and torment that I have suffered.

Look, you can have both for a tenner. How’s that?