[Dave Rice]

These days I just assume I am being “spied on” 24 / 7 either by Government Agencies or someone trying to sell me something.

[Dave Rice]

OK, just using a new bit of kit to provision Ubiquiti hardware onsite.

It is a small wireless gateway that can be powered from a 5v battery pack and uses an app on my Android phone.

On connecting to the SSID Android 6 asks me “This network has no Internet access. Stay Connected? No Yes and a tick box for don’t ask again for this network.

[Dave Rice]

I use Chrome for every day browsing and FF for accessing infrastructure like NAS boxes and CCTV cameras etc.

As for spying, they are all at it in one form or another. There are official Google opt out extensions for IBA and analytics and I run an ad blocker in both.

[Dave Rice]

If you read this thread on the Amazon forums http://tinyurl.com/kl6mta3 the problem isn’t so much Amazon as the publishers or local laws.

I guess Amazon have to cover themselves and it’s far too much faffing about to do it on a book by book basis.

[Dave Rice]

And me, probably got the heads up from you!

[Dave Rice]

Absolutely.

[Dave Rice]

We know how much willy waving goes on with FPS. For me “good enough” is good enough but for others they may like some headroom for the future. Starting off XX% down can’t really be recommended unless the price is very right.

I am looking forward to the lower end stuff but I think IPC will be even more important there. Don’t forget 2+2 is now £80 Pentium territory and 3.6Ghz at that.

[Dave Rice]

I understand there will be another.

As for final, to me it seemed very open ended.

[Dave Rice]

I thought you meant you’d taken to drinking wine like us soft southerners.

[Dave Rice]

I bought my giffordsystems.co.uk domain through a mate who has a reseller account with freeparking.

Unfortunately their webmail hosting had issues with incorrectly identifying legitimate incoming mail as spam and no user controls. They had also got their servers marked as spam by Virgin. Nobody is interested in solving these things for cheap / free services so it was almost useless for business as I was missing emails from suppliers as they were going straight to spam.

All I had to do was change the MX (and some other) records to point at the Microsoft servers and it was problem solved. Microsoft is a trusted source, their spam filters work and are under my control. The annual cost of £94 is just another business expense like insurance and the accountant. Indeed it’s the cheapest of them!

For me it’s worth it for the hosted Exchange account alone. The Outlook client for Android is very good too, certainly enough for my needs.

[Dave Rice]

You need the business version http://tinyurl.com/jcdovyb

[Dave Rice]

I find the Sky router drops off dramatically with distance. There is little you can do with it, believe me I’ve tried all sorts of things.

The problem is WiFi access points are usually in totally the wrong place as they are tied to the master socket. Extenders are a PITA and are quite difficult to position correctly. Even if you do they halve the signal by their very nature. The hope is that half of something is better than bugger all, but it rarely is.

Homeplugs I find drop off after 6 to 12 months. They become unreliable and slow up.

The solution we sell, and I’ve mentioned many times before, is a decent business grade AP up as high as possible. We usually put them next to loft hatches as that is often the central point in the house. The problem is you have to wire them back to the router, which we do by going externally.

We use the Ubiquiti UAP range with Cloud Controllers and have only once ever needed more than one (an L shaped farmhouse). I usually just use the 2.4Ghz N one (sometimes the more powerful LR) but they have dual band AC.

[Dave Rice]

I agree 365 is a good deal and I’m not aware of anything missing. I use the Business Premium myself on 4 devices. I needed a reliable email host for my custom domain having had big issues with the freebie hosts. A professional email host will cost you nearly what MS do so Office was almost free.

Personally I don’t use One Drive much as I have Cloud Station via my own Synology server but the ability to get to everything via a browser is handy. It’s also useful for me to be up to date with the latest versions.

But if you don’t need all these things Robin is correct, I have been buying “ORIGINAL OFFICE PROFESSIONAL PLUS 2016 LICENSE KEY GENUIN 32 / 64BIT SCRAP PC” for £5.40 http://tinyurl.com/hr9m5v8 and no issues so far.

You get a key and a link to the official MS download site where you put the key in to get the correct version. Once installed you still need to authorize it with the key. I make sure I pay with PayPal.

[Dave Rice]

The antenna in the tablet will be more sensitive than the phones (cos it’s bigger).

However I’m surprised you have any WiFi coverage issues (EE is another matter).

[Dave Rice]

No, nothing will happen until there is a user.

Given my experiences when I reset W10 Anniversary on my T420, I would set it up for them with a default user in all respects. If they have no knowledge that’s exactly what they’ll do. If they have knowledge they can reset what they want.

It all upgraded from W7 to W10 and then Anniversary just fine. All the Lenovo stuff was present and still worked. Doing the reset wiped out all the Lenovo stuff, device manager was just full of unknown devices and I’ll bet yours is too. The display sorted itself out but I needed to go to Intel to get the chipset drivers (and probably others) as Lenovo had cut support from Anniversary onwards (although some generic utilities like battery monitor are still available) to get everything else working.

[Dave Rice]

I’m on Sky N. The only thing I have unticked is Wireless Isolation (can’t remember if it’s on by default). Wireless isolation just stops wireless clients from seeing each other, but they should be able to see wired.

I’ve just logged onto the Sky SSID and deliberately disconnected the WAN. If the wireless had gone down too I wouldn’t be able to capture this.

 

[Dave Rice]

AFAIK there is no way to do this without resorting to VBA.

Even then I’ve only seen it used as some sort of timer with stop and start buttons.

[Dave Rice]

Just leave it a bit, <15 but usually <5 minutes, and it will sort itself out with the pukka Intel driver and utilities.

You won’t get any drivers from Lenovo for Windows Anniversary (although they did do W10 ver 1) but go to Intel and download the driver update utility.

If there’s a fingerprint reader (and some other hardware) it generally won’t work until you do this. It will then work just fine with Windows Hello.

[Dave Rice]

The white box is long gone, you just need a VDSL capable router. it’s the same for Sky but they use an obscure authorisation method and you can’t find out what your credentials are.

I recently looked at a TT ADSL router and the credentials are both in plain text, plus all you do is phone 0345 172 0049 from the same line to get an automated message with the details.

For fibre from what I can see you’re right there is no user name or password, just set VLAN1 and MPoA with automatic IP. I’ll be experimenting after the dust has settled (transfer is 28th March).

@Tippon. Two reasons for me doing it the hard way:

Sky’s DHCP pool is 192.168.0.x and TT is 192.168.1.x Increasingly new kit is turning up with a default IP address in 192.168.1.x It’ll save me a lot of messing about.

I’ve let “fixed” devices get their IP from DHCP then made that static. The result is that their addresses are all over the place. Not a huge problem but a tidy up would be good.

[Dave Rice]

Current packages, what would have been April’s bill:

Variety HD £44.00
Sky Fibre Unlimited £20.00
Sky Talk Line Rental £18.99
Sky Talk Anytime Extra £8.00

Replaced by Sky TV (discounted by £10.56 per month, with remaining duration of 18 months) = £14.44 and Talktalk £37 It does include Sky 1, Atlantic, Arts, etc. basically what you see in the Entertainment tab.

Gained faster fibre and £40, lost Docs, music and Kids. I’ve also gained the ability to use any router I like.

[Author]

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