MM..DSL goodness…
We have internet! Drat. I also have a soggy keyboard. Sigh.
Yes, Plus.net activated us bang on schedule. I now have an “upto 8mb” connection, sat at..hang on:
Bandwidth (Up/Down) [kbps/kbps]: 448 / 7,776
Not bad for the same price as Tiscali that could barely hit 2, and the support from Plus.Net is outstanding!
So, We’re back in the game again. No more using the unsecured neighbourhood wifi points.
It’s been a windy few days here…the house gets seriously battered by wind..fences banging all night long, doors whistling, garage doors banging..we’ve had it all. I lost my temper yesterday with the fence and stuffed wedges in the uprights, then screwed them in…that’s now fixed. The whistling door in the front room is due to the door being a bad fit in the frame and quite rotten..as a temporary measure I taped it up. I will sort it with silicone later on.
The garage door..well..yes. It’s thin aluminium. The lock is broken, so I removed it, and it took me if you recall several hours to make it work as a door again after years of disuse. Well, now it’s got 2 holes in the top and some big screws holding it tight shut until I find a better answer..it shakes the house when it bangs in the wind.
So quiet nights are back. Yay. I’ve changed our gas supplier to Ebico, as we’re putting £20-25 on the gas meter a week, even though we have the A rated efficient boiler on for only 7 hours a day, with the thermostat set down. British gas say that’s “normal”..I say bollocks. It was cheaper to heat the house and water on electric! That can’t be right.
BG refuse to send out an engineer to check the meter, and I’m damned if I’m paying that price…so I found Ebico..they resell through another company, are a “non profit” supplier, and supply gas at a flat rate of 2.55p per KW with no distinction on the type of meter or payment, and no standing charge…so it’ll cost us a quarter of the british gas cost to run the gas, we’ll lose nothing to the standing charge, and we’ll not be biased against due to liking the “pay as you use” meter. They also said they could send out an engineer to check the meter.
They’re a company based on christian ethics, that value people over profit and think (as I do) that it’s unfair that those with little money, on these types of meter should be discriminated against. So now I’ll wait for the changeover..:)
Electricity wise, I’m impressed…even though the pay as you go smart meter is a higher cost per unit of electric, is with Npower (eek), and has a 50p/week standing charge, we’ve used..an almighty £4 plus a bit in a week! That’s normal usage, energy saver bulbs, nothing on standby, router, laptop, my desktop, some extra usage due to using the jigsaw…nothing unusual..
That works out even cheaper than our 3 room flat, on a credit meter! Bearing in mind this place has twice the rooms, and the electric is more expensive..it’s unexpected, to say the least.
Ah well, back to playing with Vista…I have both Vista and XP on here, and a Vista and XP virtual PC as well…I’m just going to sacrifice the vista virtual PC to Vista SP1 and see what breaks..heh..