Category: Product Reviews

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Product Reviews

Are ISP's just stupid??

Are Internet Service Providers dumb? Why when end users call in for tech support on their connection, the first thing they get told is to “turn off your firewall”. Are you kidding me? Most users don’t have a hardware router or firewall to block all the bad stuff, just software firewalls, and when an ISP tells them to turn it off, they will get hacked in 10 minutes. ISP tech support is just lazy. Instead of troubleshooting and fixing someone’s internet connection (which is their job) they tell them to turn off their firewalls. It is like this: I have a problem getting my car started, so I call a local shop, and they tell me to unlock and open all my doors, and then it will work. Well maybe it will work, but everything will get stolen out of my car (I know that isn’t the best analogy, but it sort of works).

I have had three people call me and tell me that this is what the ISP told them to do. Two from Astound and one from Charter. WTF are these ISP’s thinking?? It just makes me mad when people take the lazy route.

END USERS: IF YOUR ISP TELLS YOU TO TURN OFF YOUR FIREWALL OR ANTIVIRUS – TELL THEM THAT YOU RATHER PUT YOUR WALLET AND BELONGINGS OUT IN YOUR YARD FOR SOME PASSERBY TO JUST WALK BY AND TAKE.

I can’t stress this enough. DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR FIREWALL!!!!!!!

The bad guys:

Charter

Astound

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Product Reviews

Blogger Bar…WTF

ok…so blogger.com decided to put this blogger bar up top of my blog, which is cool, but it broke my custom template, and I can’t get it back to the way I want it. Nice! arghhh…..maybe someday if I get ambitious.

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Product Reviews

Napster

Napster.

The long forgotten music downloading application. Well, a while back when the “new” Napster came out, I signed up for it, downloading some singles at 99 cents a piece. Well, today I decided to take the plunge. I signed up for Napster Premium for like 12 bux a month, and I am getting a free portable player to boot. I have jacked tons of music from the net for almost 10 years, so I figure it might be time to go legit. The premium service is cool, you can download as many tracks as you want, and listen to them online or offline. The downside is you can’t burn them, but you can transfer them to a portable device, which is cool. If you wan to burn a track, you need to purchase it standalone from your premium subscription.

Some other things that kind of irk me are that some bands don’t have any tracks (The Beatles are the biggest I see), so you can’t get all the music you want. When I first signed up, 311 didn’t have any tracks, now all their mainstream albums are on there! Still, there are almost a million tracks, but you won’t find the “bootleg” tracks for artists, so you are left to searching the net or using a p2p app to look for those.

CD Burning is built into the application, and there is radio/magazine/message boards, with radio and message boards only available to premium members.

Napster

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Product Reviews

Online Eye

Have you ever wanted to monitor your network speed? A co-worker of mine stumbled up Online Eye. I installed it, and it is pretty cool Send and Recv traffic graphs, and if you dig it, has all network tools (ping, trace, whois, etc).

Use this tool if you want to measure your bandwidth!!

Online Eye

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Product Reviews

Astound Vs. Charter

So I finally broke down and bought my first “Video on Demand” movie last night from Astound cable. It was so cool, I would have to say it was like I was watching the DVD. I ordered a pizza, and I could just pause the movie to go pay the delivery guy.

Astound also has DVR capabilities, like TiVo. I don’t think the software on for the DVR part is as complicated as TiVo, but it works. You can search by actor or anything, just channel, date, title. I have run into a few glitches, but a hard reset of the box gets things running again.

As far as internet, I don’t know, I have heard from many people who have Astound that their internet goes down a lot. The only time mine has stopped working, I first got an email from Astound telling me when and why, at least 3 days in advance.

Charter on the other hand, the internet was down pretty much 3 times a week, and my cable modem needed replacing. When I called to get a new one, they said “Come pick one up”. I said “Come bring me one, I didn’t break it, It is just defective”. I heard when you bring a defective cable modem back to Charter they just put it back in the rotation without even fixing it, so six months down the road some schmuck will get a bad cable modem. How nice is that?

As for the cable, Charter didn’t have DVR or VOD. When I called to cancel, that is why I told them I was canceling. The guy (from some call center eight states away) was like “But we might have that in the next year, please stay!!”. Sorry, get with the times please. And once I think about it, Astound’s digital cable navigation system is like light years ahead of Charter’s.

I am also pretty sure Astound customer service is local, which is cool too.

Charter should focus more on local than big picture. They will end up falling into the same pit as many companies before them. Astound can deliver the same services, plus more, and deliver them better. Before I switched I was a devout Charter guy, now I would have to say Astound all the way. Oh, and BTW – It is cheaper!!

Astound Broadband

Charter Communications

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Product Reviews

Yahoo "DoEverything" Bar?

Well, I caught wind of a beta Yahoo Toolbar. Now they are adding spyware protection to it. What next? Will it start writing programs for me too? That would be nice though…I think the beta run is over though, too bad, I would have tried it. Hopefully it works well

Yahoo Toolbar (Beta)

Yahoo Toolbar (Plain Old)