DaveI

My exchange isn't on the list of congested exchanges. My fault along with a big long list of people on the sky forums is an excellent connection of 39996 down according to the router but only ever managing speed tests of 24 Mbps tops which equates to a throughput of 2.4mbps when downloading. Sky have finally acknowledged the issue apparently but have no fix forthcoming.

Sky here but have the "half speed" issue that they can't seem to fix :(

I used Tom Tom from when it was on a Dell PDA and they have always been brilliant. Always just bought the cheapest as well, The One. Since I got the Passat I've been using the built in nav which I was sceptical about but it hasn't let me down yet. As a back up I have Waze on my iPhone just in case. Regarding mounts the best by far I have ever used is Brodit mounts from www.dsldevelopments.com, expensive but worth it!

We currently have a contract installing IP phones in a chain of sandwich shops who are all city centre based, so I park mostly wherever I can at normally £5 for two hours!

My company was on re-branded 3 contract a couple of years ago, since then we have had Vodafone and o2. I found 3 miles better than Vodafone and on par with o2, i'm all over the country with work so it's not just "3 are the best at my house" either. The only problem I had was trying to leave 3 for a mobile broadband I had and didn't need any more, it took a few phone calls to convince them I was leaving.

The only time I've ever had a dodgy experience with a salesman was when i went to buy an ex police Cavalier SRi when I was about 19, sales fella basically wouldn't even entertain me and tried to sell me a lovely Pug 306 Diesel instead, much more in my price range apparently. Went to another garage and bought a Cavalier 2.0 CDX instead. Lately sales people have been brilliant whilst face to face, only Skoda have failed to come back with promised pricing etc.

I was travelling a safe distance behind a car doing 70mph, that car suddenly changes lanes and I'm faced with advancing rapidly on a car doing 30mph. There was no emergency action to avoid the car, checked the right hand lane and pulled out, if I was being overtaken at the time there would have been some fairly hard braking but no danger of losing control. Let me know if you are still ok with people doing 30 on a dual carriageway when you are stuck in a couple of miles tailback at a busy time and find it was grandad in his Honda Jazz holding everyone up.

Got to disagree with you here, on Sunday I was following an xtrail doing about 70 with a decent gap on a straight bit of the A19. We closed on a car which I hadn't seen due to the Xtrail being a tall vehicle (some tiny Japanese thing) doing about 30 at a guess and the xtrail left it pretty late to change lanes which left me closing rapidly on the car he had just overtaken, luckily there wasn't anything overtaking me at the time other I would have had to brake pretty hard to avoid the dawdler.

All BT Vans have trackers and engineers are constantly managed and monitored to create performance statistics. In the old days a BT engineer used to get a list of jobs on the morning and if they raced through them they were finished when they were finished. Now the engineers don't know what they are doing from one job to the next, they are assigned work when they sign off their last job, each job has an average duration that they should hit. This is why I never meet a happy BT engineer any more.

They did allegedly take on a load of ex army signals engineers specifically to work on the Infinity project. That's obviously not going very well!

I was in exactly the same situation as you during the summer, I wanted a GTi for the wifes daily driver and my weekend car. She wasn't happy about how much the road tax was going to cost so we compromised and got a 2010 Golf GTD. Love it to little tiny pieces, I think the only difference visually between the GTi and GTD is the alloys, colour of strip on the grill and rear diffuser / exhaust setup. Handles really well, ten times better than my Passat, interior feels quality and the previous owner had spent quite a bit on extras. We are both really happy with it.

I follow Durham RPU on Twitter and they had caught the same bloke twice in one week! Off topic for this thread but they did tweet about catching a Truck running red diesel, when the owner turned up they dipped the tank in his car and found red diesel in there as well!

We had ours done about three years ago and it was around £3000 all in. Baxi Combi boiler, 8 radiators and all new pipes throughout the house as we were moving from a ducted warm air system. Our house is a nightmare as well as it's concrete construction so it took a lot of drilling to get the new pipes in. Think that price included having the pipes boxed in as well.

If you google the issue you will find a lot of other people have the same problems. I think Apple broke it in IOS6.

Depressingly I think my wifes GTD is the nicest car out of all the people we know. I do have a customer who I know quite well who has a Brand new Porsche 911, an original AM Vanquish, A Range Rover and a VW Amarok for driving around his estate.

That's interesting as I did read that the 2820 was maxed out at 40meg on WAN2, we currently have an ongoing project of 26 sandwich shops to be connected back to a head office for a VPN. Draytek 2955 at the head office on a 10meg leased line Draytek 2830n on Broadbands. Done 7 shops so far and had 2 faulty 2830n, one just constantly rebooted and the other couldn't hold a stable connection. Bit worrying as the old blue Draytek routers and the 2820 seemed rock solid.

I've had a Dewalt 18V Combi with faulty brushes then a faulty selector so it's now full speed hammer only, not particularly heavy use either. It's only really used to drill through the floors of portacabins. I'm currently running a Wurth 18v Combi that seems to be a good bit of kit. Never had a noisy charger though, had a Bosch Green, then a Blue, A Dewalt and now Wurth. That's over 10 years or so, I must not actually do much work looking at that meager list!

ADSL, in the telephone exchange a pair of wires from the DSLAM is connected over the top of the two wires that provide the traditional voice service to your home, this gives you ADSL. VDSL, the pair of copper wires come from the exchange as they always have which provide your voice service. A fibre goes to the cabinet near your home which is now where the DSLAM cards reside. The copper pair from the DSLAM is connected to your voice pair within the cabinets near your home. Bascially situating the DSLAM cards closer to your home drastically reduces the distance data has to travel over copper to bring the speeds up.

Total down time on my FTTC install was around 30 minutes.

There's no such thing as a user install FTTC connection, you still have to have the engineer work his magic in the cabinet outside. BT can advertise what they like for install times, it still comes down to Openreach having the engineering capacity in your area to actually do the install. At the minute Openreach have a Matters Beyond Our Reasonable Control in effect for most of the country trying to catch up after the storms. So fixing faults is the priority then new installs. BT (The sales arm) shouldn't be estimating such low install times across the board, they can hit that in certain parts of the country but it's unrealistic in the majority. I work for a company that deals directly with Openreach and we have the same issue, new install dates are now into January for even the most basic of installs. You aren't being singled out, there's no conspiracy, there's a queue.

Haven't even got around to getting prices yet, the R620 and R720 are the only Dell servers certified for some new software we are looking at implementing so that's why I recognised the model number. Hopefully getting around to spec'ing them next week. I'll let you know.

I've been looking at the R720s as well, i'm either going to need three or six. Will they throw a laptop in as a sweetener do you think?

My current Mazda is my longest owned and highest mileage car, it's three years old next week and has just under 74k on it. It's going back to the lease company on Friday and the new one is getting delivered Couldn't imagine doing 200k in the same car, for my current mileage that would be eight years, i'd be bored to tears! (dependant on what car it was I suppose)

I can type really quite easily on my iPhone and iPad but for some reason the Fire keyboard just does not suit me at all. If you are planning on sending a lot of emails I would get down to PC World and see how you get on with the keyboards.

Anyone else tried the iPad app that lets you control your Sky+ HD box? It's very impressive but totally pointless