Matt Charlton

Busy evening tonight. 

Had 50mbit installed, the modem is lovely, really nice compared to the crappy Scientific Atlanta we got given last year when it updated to 20mbit.  The speed is immense.  Clocked it at around 5.9mb/sec at around 6:30pm, I know it’ll go a ilttle faster too. 

I get a free Wireless N router from Virgin, it hasn’t arrived yet though so that presented me with a problem.  The current Netgear FVG 318 that I have doesn’t support 50mbit on the WAN port.  It doesn’t even really support 20mbit, downloading at full speed meant the other pcs on the network couldn’t access the Internet at all. 

There were forum posts on Digital Spy that said the router could be 4-8 weeks away.  Me being me couldn’t even go half an hour without being able to get access to the full pipe :p

I decided to take the spare PC and stick another network card in it and install Smoothwall on there as recommended by Gareth and Steve.  Set up was easy, finally got IDS installed after it took an hour or so to grab the rule downloads, it felt like downloading on a 56kb modem.

I discovered the most awesome thing in the world today, Windows Live Messenger dynamic display pictures. 

From left to right we have my standard picture that has funny eyebrow movements, my face and my OMFG face.  The pictures don’t even begin to show how funny these things are with the video.  It’s certainly given me some giggles tonight and raised my mood somewhat. 

So, 50mbit connection is set up and firewalled, working properly.  I also managed to find the Flip Video Mino Digital Camcorder – Black (2GB)
for £117.44 on Amazon rather than the £159.99 I was going to pay for it from Firebox.

Sue’s getting me it for my birthday, I’m going to use it with youtube for making video diaries and things.  Should be fairly interesting.  That reminds me, I need to think about sorting out another podcast.

So,

I made a decision today. (yay)

I have the Virgin VIP package which gives me:

A HD V+ box
A regular cable box
Full channel lineup including sports and movies
Phone rental and unlimited calls
20mb Broadband

Now this is costing £88.75 a month. 

Jesus Christ

Thats £1065 a year.

Oh my god.

We don’t even watch TV half of the time, most of the stuff we record on the V+ box and watch later.

I’ve decided that nearly everything we watch is on terrestrial – I made this observation when we were away in Whitby and only had 4 channels.  Didn’t miss a thing.

I’ve ordered the Play TV box for the PS3.  Its a USB box which turns your PS3 into a freeview PVR.  It cost me £60 from amazon.  I’ve also bought a 320GB SATA drive (£70) to swap in for my 60GB to give me some extra space (with the game installs theres not much room left for recording). 

So the plan. 

Test out the playTV over the coming days and weeks.

If we have a decent freeview signal and it works as expected I’m going to ditch 90% of the Virgin services.

Do we really need the home phone? We’ve bought got mobiles with 1200 minutes free a month.  The only person who EVER rings me on the home phone number is my uncle Mark and thats when he has a PC problem – the phones can go (although if its only £11 a month and it keeps the cost of the BB down, I’ll keep it but use it for incoming calls only).

The TV service is going completely.  Over 200 channels of shite.  It won’t be missed.  Freeview has Dave and Nuts TV (wahey). 

Broadband.

Hmmmm.

This is where it gets tricky.  I have no BT phoneline, well there is one, but its not active.  Which means Cable is the way to go at the moment.  I also prefer the cable service to ADSL. 

So, line rental should be around £11.  It’ll be around £35 maximum (I’m hoping its going to be less) for the broadband.  So I’ll be looking at less than £50 for the two per month and £600 a year.  Mucho fantastico savings. 

Once the PlayTV has arrived and I’ve had chance to test it, I’ll feedback.  I’ll also post about how I get on with Virgin when I phone them to cancel half of the services

**Update**

Just spoken to customer services and it would be £11 a month for the telephone and £30 a month for 20mb.  New customers get 20mb for £10 a month for the first 6 months and £20 a month after that.  Bastards.

I’ll speak to retentions when I phone back next week and tell them I’ll go get a BT line put in.