Oh what a few hours fun I’ve had…not!!! We had our smartbox upgraded and a Tivo thingy installed today as we threatened to leave for BT. Seemed a good deal as we’ll be paying less for more… anyway to cut to the chase. A large sweaty Virgin engineer turned up it soon became apparent that things were bound to go wrong as before I had chance to power down my beloved Suse pc he had (accidentally?) switched the power off to my pc at the wall. Aghhhhh!!! I looked on in horror as his meat fisted hands slammed the new shiny smart hub (far smarter than him) onto the floor… He yanked my previous hub hard enough to nearly dislodge my screen onto the floor apparently forgetting to check if anything was plugged into it…
After a nerve shredding time He said right that’s done and pushed the power button on the front of my pc… NOTHING… My eyes widened!! “Huh it’s not my fault”. I tried to boot myself… nothing not even the psu indicator lit up. I surmised correctly that it had tripped an internal surge protector however to play safe I enquired whether Virgin were covered for this. At that he almost errupted that it had nothing to do with him; he had only(!) switched the power off and you’re not gonna put that on me! Then before I could react he shot out of our house. As you can probably appreciate I was fuming and rather than throwing a complete wobbly and scaring our two cats (and my wife) took time out in the garden. When I returned he had apologised and gave the number of his manager.
By that point the psu had reset so I could power up. But, my word, how long did it take to get to the bios splash screen (well over a minute) and it had lost a hard-drive. Much grating of teeth, swearing and almost emotional breakdown later I flashed the bios and with fingers crossed and much touching of wood, my beloved sprang back into life; firing on all cylinders!!
All seems well now but this was not the sort of Saturday afternoon I had wanted! I just want a simple life without knuckle scraping barbarians trying to destroy my work and pleasure. Please Virgin employ people with some idea of how computers work and should be treated…
Had you pressed escape while waiting, you would have seen the hard drives being restored by reference to the journals. You would also have seen any error messages that openSUSE sent. Have a look in /var/log/messages - you may get the full story of what happened.
I don’t let any engineers in my place - never.
Anyway we are still on copper here. Though with LLU with TalkTalk, I get what is described as 20MB, which is better than the old ADSL MAX 8MB
Sorry to hear of your account. Stuff like that is very stressful
Virgin Media (good service IME) took over NTL (awful), where NTL installed my BB and TV. Their sub-contractors decided to cable internally which involved drilling through walls. Eventually they managed to drill the right wall, but the exit wounds were so bad. An NTL supervisor had to attend next day (a weekend) with filler to repair the damage, because the installers weren’t paid enough to carry such material. >:(lol!
Having moved location, I went with TalkTalk. We (UK) are all on some copper at least the local end to the box in the street, even though I have a fibre service at 30 Mb/sec. I assume you meant 20 Megabits and 8Mb (8MB is Megabytes).
For fibre, the separate BT “openreach” modem and TalkTalk router are both installed by BT, very well I must say and in a very short visit with no issues (lucky me).
On 2014-05-19 21:46, consused wrote:
> Virgin Media (good service IME) took over NTL (awful), where NTL
> installed my BB and TV. Their sub-contractors decided to cable
> internally which involved drilling through walls. Eventually they
> managed to drill the right wall, but the exit wounds were so bad. An NTL
> supervisor had to attend next day (a weekend) with filler to repair the
> damage, because the installers weren’t paid enough to carry such
> material. >:(lol!
I have satellite tv, paid service. Long story. Recently they offered to
improve my service, changing the old one with analog output to one that
goes out via hdmi, and has an internal HD. I can now pause and do
internal recordings, instead of using video tape. I don’t know if that
is improvement, because I can not get the recordings out of the damned
machine in anyway…
Ok, but they wanted to change the dish to point to another satellite,
which provides more resolution, it seems. That meant placing the dish at
the other side of the house, and drilling holes on several walls (my
external walls are 50 cm of stone). I said no way, I’ll stay with the
old satellite and worse resolution.
Who cares… my TV set is no bigger than 23 inches in diagonal… I can
not see those extra pixels anyway.
Oh, well. Maybe sometime they offer fiber in my district, and I can
ditch the satellite dish. Hopefully I can see cable/inet TV in any room
I choose, via ethernet that I install myself or wifi… I’ll go on dreaming.
