gac

The T&Cs seem to say "if you lose, you pay nothing, the fees come from the other side. If you win, then you are liable for the portion which is deemed to be 'costs', and you keep 100% of the portion deemed as 'compensation'". The way I understand that on further consideration is that the 'compensation' is the cost to repair the car - I keep 100% of that, and it covers my repairs. The 'costs' are what it has cost to process the claim, which (as you say) would be recovered from the third party, and would then remain with the solicitors. So after further reading it's not necessarily that I would actually have to pay anything, it's more about not receiving something, which wouldn't actually leave me out of pocket. Slight misunderstanding on my part, and (again, as you say) may differ depending on the insurance status of the third party. edit - if I win, I pay charges and disbursements, capped at the figure received from the third party. If I lose, I do not pay charges, but may pay disbursements such as court fees, medical fees, and other undisclosed fees.

From your descriptions this sounds like ATE cover - but it's "sanctioned" by my insurance broker (which is not yourselves, so do feel free to stop helping at any point if it's frowned upon!). By which I mean, I called their claims line and because I do not accept liability, this is their procedure, and they do this for all non-liability claims. If I were to admit liability, they said it would be handled internally by themselves, otherwise this is just the way they do things. I need to check my policy to find out what legal cover I have included, and I also have some legal cover included as part of my breakdown membership. But it sounds like if I have other forms of legal cover I would be better off using those - I'm just not sure how to reconcile that with the fact that this firm is my insurance brokers "official" way of handling incidents. I don't see how I can avoid dealing with this firm.

And now for something slightly more ranty. I now have one 6 page document to sign, with details of the accident, which refers to my agreement to another 9 page document of T&Cs for the Conditional Fee Agreement. This is "no win, no fee" - if I lose then there's no fees from me as they're recovered from the other side. If I win, then I am liable for the (unknown at this point) figure which is decided as the costs. It doesn't actually say anywhere in this document what happens to my car whether I win or lose. I am assuming that if I win, everything goes through the third party's insurer as a non-fault claim. And that if I lose, everything goes back to my insurer as a fault claim, which they handle directly. But no one has actually said that, and it's not in any of this documentation, just pages of "did you know we also provide medical care, you might be injured, please, please use our medical care and here are the costs we can subsequently claim to fund ourselves". They won't start work on the claim for 14 days, unless I waive away my distance selling cancellation rights, so I need to read and understand all this stuff beforehenad since my choices are either submit it and they wait two weeks, or I submit it and sign away any cancellation rights. So, I don't actually know what I'm signing up for, since I don't know what the costs might be. A good assumption is that the longer it goes on, the higher the costs are. So by continuing to assert that I am not at fault, I am costing myself money. Or if I just turn around and say that I am at fault, that would then cost me "different" money (in terms of my premiums and NCD). And then there's the issue of whether he has insurance I can actually claim from, since the car is still not on the MID and the police didn't call back last night. I called them this morning, only to find that the constable who attended the scene is the only person who is allowed to give me the information, he's on response on nights again tonight, and then on his 4 rest days. So if he doesn't call me back by 11pm tonight, I have to call in again to try and get in touch with him, otherwise I won't even know who the other party is (other drivers insurers or MIB) until next week. </vent>

I don't think BT "forced" you to anything. I seem to recall that they withdrew the speed-capped products when everything became generic ADSL2+ (a la the "up to 24Mb/s" or later "up to 16Mb/s" service). This was the same provisioning for every customer, and your speed was defined by your line, not a soft cap. BT may have taken this opportunity to market VDSL-aka-FTTC to you, but I doubt they would have forced you because VDSL is a fairly big jump in price, particularly 7 years ago (I don't even remember it being around 7 years ago, although my area took a long time to become enabled) I'm sure you are welcome to cancel your FTTC and order ADSL without involving the CEO of BT and the Ombudsman, since there is nothing that would stop you buying ADSL. Of course, BT's internal systems may not allow you to downgrade in which case you would have to cancel and re-order, but taking up the Ombudsman's time on a pointless complaint seems a bit counterintuitive to me.

That would be nice. I'm not admitting liability since I am sure it's not my fault, but having been in a similar situation (in 2005 someone drove into the back of me while stationary in traffic which went 50/50 due to being my word against his) I'm aware that there's only so many times the insurers will argue over liability before it comes down to that again, whether that be with the MIB or with the other driver's insurance company. The last incident I was in was that one in 2005 where it was all handled by the insurance company (or at least I dealt with the insurers, I'm sure they used lawyers internally), so the solicitor thing is a bit new to me. They're clearly more than capable of handling it, it's just a bit frustrating that they seem to be concentrating on an area that I've already told them isn't relevant (the personal injury side). No one was hurt in my car so I have no claim to make there, I just want the car sorting quickly. The paperwork has just arrived, so I now have some reading to do this morning in between work, just so I know what I'm agreeing to....thanks for your advice though, it's appreciated

A new policy is the assumption the police were making, I think, and they did try to call someone at the insurance company but didn't get in contact. Not sure how that works with CIE and whether they'll be following up with the registered keeper (since the car was taxed, so should be insured at all times?), but that's not really relevant to this unless the driver is also the registered keeper. I had a look at the MID again this morning and it's still uninsured, but the police should be calling the company and verifying with them directly today so hopefully by this evening it'll be totally clear which way this goes. As for the MIB, the management company I spoke to over the weekend did mention it as a potential option. But I checked the website this morning, and they claim anywhere around three months to settle a claim made with them. If he is uninsured and I go down this route, do I have to wait until this claim is complete before getting the work done? Or can I go through my insurers approved repairers and then worry about settling the bill later? The damage only looks cosmetic, and the car still seems perfectly drivable with no noise/vibration/pulling, but I'd still rather get it repaired ASAP in case there is any hidden damage. On a side note, is it common for all claims to be handled by solicitors now? I've spoken to the claims line for my insurers twice over the weekend, and very much get the feeling that they're not really that arsed about the motor claim as it seems like I've answered far more questions about who was in the car and whether they were hurt. I assume they're gearing up for trying to get them to handle a personal injury claim that they can then make some money from...which doesn't make me feel very satisfied when I've already explained that no one was hurt so the motor claim is the only important bit.

The officer who came verified his identity, but couldn't verify his insurance status. In all honesty, I don't know for sure what happened as I left. The officer came and explained that the car wasn't showing on the MID, that he'd tried calling the insurer with the details the other driver gave him (and gave me the insurers name and reference number to pass on to my insurer, along with the driver's name) and that there wasn't anything else he could do tonight so he'd have to follow it up. He said he'd let me know on Monday what the crack is. At that point, he and I removed the other cars front wing from my door shut and after double-checking they didn't need anything else from me, I left. I was cold and angry, my 11 year old was a bit shaken up and stood in the central reservation, I just wanted out of it and didn't see any value in hanging around. The other driver was still there when I left but what the officer does with the other driver is up to them, maybe someone's going to be up for a *******ing for not just arresting the guy straight away, who knows - that doesn't really affect me or my claim though...

This isn't Skoda-related, but the audience here is a little more mature than other forums, so I'm going to ask anyway.... This evening, I had an incident. The basics are dual carriageway, two lane roundabout, dual carriageway, I was in the right hand lane. As I was taking my exit off the roundabout, someone drove into my front wing. The roundabout is traffic light controlled, and I believe the other driver must have jumped a red light (although I regrettably have no dashcam, and therefore no proof). I am totally sure that my light on the roundabout was green and that I wasn't over the speed limit, as I was following another car through so the road had traffic. Even if it was amber and changed to red the instant I went through it, there would be no way for the other driver to be in the position the accident happened unless he had jumped the light. And I refuse to believe that I just drove through a red light (although I'll admit that there is a massive element of self-doubt right now...) We pulled over and spoke about exchanging details, I couldn't remember my policy number but told him straight away who I was insured with and gave him the reg number, which he could see anyway. He was sketchy about giving me his details (just said that it wasn't his fault so why should he), and then he suggested calling the police. I said I would be happy to speak to them and if that's the way he wanted to take it, I obviously wouldn't drive off. The police came, got my details off the MID, then told me that his car wasn't on it. The officer tried to call to verify whether the car was insured but couldn't get through, so I won't actually find out until Monday. I've reported it to the out-of-hours claims line for my insurers, but it just goes through to an accident management company who were more interested in whether there would be a personal injury claim (they asked what happened, who was in the car, were they hurt, no details of vehicles or anything). I asked them specifically to note that the other driver is potentially uninsured. Do I need to do anything special in regards to the claim? The claims service have said that the insurance company will call me back tomorrow so I'm going to spend tonight writing down the details as clearly as I remember them, and trying to find a satellite image of where everything happened. But do I just need to tell them that I don't accept the blame and want to claim against the other potentially uninsured party?

And in an effort to be helpful, my response to this particular sentence would be that it's an "insurance policy" of sorts. My mortgage is a fixed rate mortgage, it's more important to me that I know what I'm paying for X years, than knocking a bit of money off for a while and then being hit with a rise I can't afford My car insurance is comprehensive - I haven't had any kind of incident in 11 years now, but I'm OK with paying a bit extra to know that I won't be massively out of pocket if something does happen (still a bit out of pocket, but not as badly as repairing/replacing my car myself) My broadband is unlimited, because in the grand scheme of things it's reasonably cheap and I can't guarantee that I'll stay under the limit every month, particularly if something changes in my usage patterns, or there's a change in software, or my daughter starts streaming YouTube in 1080p instead of SD Clearly in your circumstances something has changed. BT aren't the best company by a long shot, but there is no reason that their previously-accurate accounting system would suddenly become less accurate. Windows 10 does peer to peer update delivery by default, have you disabled that? Bitmeter records usage from one device only, how many devices are in your household? 6MB for a website seems a bit big, but the web is much "richer" these days, particularly with adverts, so even the amount of data you use loading webpages you've always used such as Briskoda is increasing with time. All good reasons why I would either be looking to increase the cap considerably, or remove the limit altogether.

This has bugged me for a long time - what's with the topics all_having_underscores_and_not_spaces? Your space bar clearly works because you use it in your post, why make the titles so ridiculous?

I don't think they do Miracast, since Apple have their own (Apple-only) equivalent in Airplay.

Evolution can, but the evolution-ews package isn't installed in Mint by default. You can do IMAP out of the box, but that'll only get you email, the EWS plugin will get you calendaring, tasks, meeting requests etc, much closer to the "real" Exchange experience. It's still a little bit clunky, I don't know how much is "published EWS specs" and how much is "developer has reverse-engineered EWS over time" so there's a few edge cases, but it's pretty usable.

It's the same physical cable, and the same network to a point, but there is still a point where the traffic diverges and ends up in Sky's core, or BT's core. Personally I just go on price, and if any ISP does dodgy stuff (hijacking NXDOMAIN DNS errors to inject ads disguised as helpful search results was common for a while) then they're at the bottom of the list. Other than that, anyone can be affected by speed increases in the future, anyone can be affected by cybersecurity in the future, and anyone can be affected by court orders to censor websites in the future, anyone's call centre is pot luck whether you get one of the good ones or the bad ones, should you have to make that fateful call. The main decision you can make based on the right now is price, so that's what I usually do.

Yeah, I think it was the 260 only, maybe 260 and early 270. They fixed the supply issue pretty sharpish when it started costing them a lot in warranties, if I remember correctly. Not that that helped me when I had about 100 of the things boxed up that hadn't been touched for three years, none of them died until the warranty expired and I couldn't get any goodwill replacements from them :(

Capacitors? Dell GX260 SFF/mini tower, by any chance?

You might not see the adverts, but Google are still receiving your email, so they're still building that profile of you. I think that was the point gadgetman was trying to make. I agree though, I'm privacy concious where I can be, but the usability of Gmail (and the fact I don't have the hassle of running my own mail system, been there done that) is too compelling for me.

Pretty sure it's already reality in Ubuntu Phone. I'd love to tell you about it, but we're not allowed Seriously though, I don't think it's yet released but I've seen technical demos of it, and it is kind of cool - however I'm not sure how well it would work in the real world. Keeping battery life sensible requires a low-powered computer, I like to use a proper desktop for work. Even if I'm not doing one single computationally intensive task, I'm usually doing a lot of non-intensive tasks, and I wouldn't want that to suffer for the convenience of having my "computer" in my pocket. For me, it's trying to fill the same gap as corporate iPads, it'll probably work for some people but I'm not one of them and prefer to have a properly specced desktop, and a laptop I can take around with me.

http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pricey.html You get what you pay for - Apple chargers are expensive, agreed, but so is the equipment if you need to replace it because it's damaged by poor power circuitry. And I've had many friends with third party chargers for their Windows notebooks, you'd struggle to get anything like the original life out of one. Each to their own of course, but unless your laptop is already living on borrowed time and you'd be happy to replace it I don't think I'd take the risk personally, and that's without rogue heat/safety issues.

There are people (I've worked with them) who are over-sensitive to even the tiniest change, and I think it's those users that hold companies back (because if you upgrade then you cause people to complain "why are IT always changing things, it worked before, I can't use this", you then have to re-teach people how to do their own jobs on a new OS even though the applications they use haven't changed, there's the lost productivity while this happens, etc). My workflow with Windows 7 was "hit Start button on keyboard, type name of app, hit Enter to launch" My workflow with Windows 8 was "hit Start button on keyboard, type name of app, hit Enter to launch" My workflow with Windows 8.1 was "hit Start button on keyboard, type name of app, hit Enter to launch" My workflow with Windows 10 was "hit Start button on keyboard, type name of app, hit Enter to launch" Yes, the Start menu looked totally different in all of those iterations, but it didn't affect the way I actually use my computer one bit. I can think of several people from my old job who would have fallen foul of hurdle number 1 in Windows 8 immediately because it didn't have an on-screen Start button and they don't know the keyboard "shortcut" of hitting the actual physical Start key. At the point they can't do that, they will instantly forget how to do everything else in this sequence of events, meaning a call to IT. Worst still, even when you've shown them how it works, they won't remember it for a long time and they'll be very vocal in the meantime about "ugh why do IT hate me by making me do this and learn new things when what I had before worked for me".

I have some standard bayonets, some SES(?) mini-screw ones, some full size screw ones and some GU10s. Mostly from IKEA. Pretty happy with them, there's instant light now instead of the painfully slow warmup of my old energy savers, less heat given off, and the temperature on these is perfectly fine. Not sure what they are (and they're probably all slightly different) but I'll take the one in the "home office" out later and check it if I remember. I prefer a warmer light though, to the point where I even have my computer screens adjusted by f.lux to around 3500K.

I've done this in the past for failed drives in external enclosures that are out of warranty and just dropped in new disks, and it's been fine. It's just a SATA connection inside, with whatever SATA-USB bridge the enclosure manufacturer chose to use. It's not impossible that you'll have some interoperability issues with the drivers built into the Xbox and the bridge, but I wouldn't have thought it was likely.

Again though, it's not necessarily a kickback, if you do that as a company you're just making things easier for yourself. There's probably no technical reason that the software couldn't run on Windows 7 next year - however, by officially supporting it, they're having to open their tech support lines to a lot more customers, maintain test environments, do a lot more QA before releasing, etc. It's a cost to the company (although for what they charge you'd think they could suck it up). I'm not saying I LIKE that approach and it's a bit short sighted to be dropping 7 support while it's still got a few years of life left with MS (you'd think they wouldn't do that until 2019/2020 actually came around) but I've dealt with vendors of that kind of software before and they're usually in a very privileged position because their application is highly specialised and it's not likely that you'll be able to simply pull out support with it and use something else so you'll actually comply with their conditions. Don't like Office? You could use LibreOffice, or OpenOffice, or the IBM fork of OpenOffice, there are some options. Don't like your specialist radio antenna design package? Tough, unless you want to write your own. When I still worked with people who did CAD stuff it was only ever SolidWorks or AutoCAD, with the decision usually made depending on what was used by anyone you collaborated with since the interoperability between the two was pretty much nil. I've also worked with companies who have the absolute opposite approach; "what's that sir, you want to run our application on Windows 10? No, we don't support that, we're still developing on Windows 7 here with no plans to upgrade until it's end of life so that's the only platform that we can offer you support with, maybe if you try installing it on Windows 10 then you could let us know how it goes?". No, I'm not going to do your job for you, and I'm not going to put off all future upgrade plans based on your terrible schedule. I know which approach I'd prefer, personally...

Not necessarily true - don't forget that they can increase profits by making savings as well as income. For example they recently decreed that IE11 is the only version of IE that will receive any more updates, ever. So the teams/staff members that were previously keeping 9 and 10 afloat now don't need to do that and can either move to another area of the business avoiding unnecessary recruitment, or be made redundant avoiding unnecessary salaries. By getting people onto Windows 10 they're moving to a new way of rolling out features/patches which mean that once a critical mass is on there they can pull Windows 7 support in 2020 (and 8 probably not too long afterwards) and streamline their OS support greatly in a similar way. It also means that hopefully they'll do a better job with their product due to "streamlining the lineup", which has positive effects on their perceived quality.

^^ this. Thankfully (touch wood) I've never lost any data - however, having worked in IT for many years, I've seen plenty of people who have and don't want it to happen to me. In total, I have one copy on my home PC and one copy on my Macbook, both of which I can work with as they're unencrypted. Editing a file syncs it to the other system, and SpiderOak. My home PC also duplicates them to my home NAS and work desktop via Crashplan (encrypted). So one copy is in Crashplan on my home NAS and enables LAN-speed restores for a simple disk failure. In the event the house catches fire, one copy is in Crashplan on my work desktop, so I could bring a laptop to work and do a LAN-speed restore there. If everything else fails, or my house and the office catch fire simultaneously, then I also have a copy on SpiderOak's cloud storage which would enable a complete (but slow) restore. Some people think I'm a bit paranoid about it, and that it's completely unnecessary - however they soon change their mind when they bring me broken hard drives and there's nothing I can do about it... As for your current predicament, I can only echo what other people have said. Hard drive engineering is precision engineering. Different PCB may have a different firmware revision, you simply cannot know what that would do to your data given that it's all closed source. If this is in any way valuable then let the pros who make their living doing this take a look at it. It won't be cheap, but you'll get an idea of what's possible and an expectation of costs, and can make your informed decision then. DIYing it has the potential to make things worse and you may be looking at an unrecoverable drive and a very frosty significant other.

Over-estimating/over-thinking is a common trait amongst good IT people, I find