Client taming
Taming the clients vision into either their budget or time scale...
Friday 24 November 2006, 2:10 PM
Well done Belkin
Belkin have gone up in my estimation by leaps and bounds, I have one of their small wireless routers at home (cost around forty quid).
Recently it's started to give up the ghost, sometimes it works all day, othertimes just for half an hour, it hangs and drops the wireless connection while making the wired connections drop to 10Mb/s. So after this started to happen with greater regularity I phoned up their support line (not expecting much). After a conversation with a nice guy in a call centre (I'm guessing in India but no complaints over his english) they agreed to ship a replacement router which has just arrived.
To be honest when I phoned them all I was expecting was an updated version of the firmware, but I got a new router with a later version of the firmware, all in all excellent service especially when consider the cost of the product.
Recently it's started to give up the ghost, sometimes it works all day, othertimes just for half an hour, it hangs and drops the wireless connection while making the wired connections drop to 10Mb/s. So after this started to happen with greater regularity I phoned up their support line (not expecting much). After a conversation with a nice guy in a call centre (I'm guessing in India but no complaints over his english) they agreed to ship a replacement router which has just arrived.
To be honest when I phoned them all I was expecting was an updated version of the firmware, but I got a new router with a later version of the firmware, all in all excellent service especially when consider the cost of the product.
Tuesday 14 November 2006, 4:53 PM
Live.com (it's worth a try)
Recently I've changed my IE home page over to live.com for me it seems to give more relevant results. Amazingly it seems like Microsoft may actually now have a better search engine than google. It's only missing one big feature for me, the google news page which I periodically glance at during the day, although live will search through news pages it doesn't give me that catagorised list of highlights to look through.
Sadly I still come top of the search rankings for certain terms (such as my laptops brand with Vista) which is a bit weird when you're looking for help (it's happened three times recently) One hidden thing is that although live.com can be limited to look only at certain sites (by adding site:xyz.com) to the search finding this requires a good rummage through the help (It can be found from the contents)
In a similar vein I've now stopped looking at Robert Scobles site http://scobleizer.com/ for my microsoft centric tech news and now use Mike Gunderloys site at http://www.larkware.com/ now this isn't entirely fair as Scoble no longer works for Microsoft but he seems to be trapped in that narrow Silicon Valley Web 2.0 bubble and seems to get less relevant each time I visit his site.
Times they are a changing....
Sadly I still come top of the search rankings for certain terms (such as my laptops brand with Vista) which is a bit weird when you're looking for help (it's happened three times recently) One hidden thing is that although live.com can be limited to look only at certain sites (by adding site:xyz.com) to the search finding this requires a good rummage through the help (It can be found from the contents)
In a similar vein I've now stopped looking at Robert Scobles site http://scobleizer.com/ for my microsoft centric tech news and now use Mike Gunderloys site at http://www.larkware.com/ now this isn't entirely fair as Scoble no longer works for Microsoft but he seems to be trapped in that narrow Silicon Valley Web 2.0 bubble and seems to get less relevant each time I visit his site.
Times they are a changing....
