www.piakocomputers.co.nz

Back by popular demand, with a better price & specs 

Includes Bag, mouse, 2Gb Flash drive & screen cleaning kit!

ADD $210 for 3 year HP ONSITE Warranty

INCLUDES 30 minutes onsite install (Te Aroha, Morrinsville & district)

My trusty 5 year old Ericsson moby finally died so I replaced it with a cheap as chips Vodafone 720 (thanks Warehouse….shame about the crap customer service though).  Nice little handset, it won’t install Java applications from the memory card but other than that it’s a brilliant wee phone.  I see both Vodafone and Telecom are pushing their new 3G services hard.  Personally I’m interested in high speed data, but I guess they should get the basics right first.  I mean, I can’t even get a signal at my house with Vodafone and on about 50% of calls my Telecom cuts out due to signal fade.  This is 2009 and I don’t live in outer Mongolia.  It’s high time the New Zealand Government banged the heads of the heads of these two companies together.  Now that Telecom has finally abandoned CDMA it would make far more sense for there to be roaming agreements and sharing of cell transmitters.  Spend a few bucks on more cell towers before spending millions on 3G data guys! 

My other mobile phone pet peeves

1) Rounding calls up to the minute.  How do they get away with this?  I ring someone, get their answerphone, hang up and get charged about a dollar? 

2) Not getting refunded when calls get cut due to signal fade. 

Another bonus of Telecom going the GSM way is we’ll no longer have to suffer their cruddy Samsung handsets.

Hmm, a few of the websites I’ve done

Mambo/Joomla

www.piakocomputers.com , www.adaptrix.co.nz , www.tearohamuseum.com , www.nzmotorcycletours.co.nz

Straight HTML

www.autosol.co.nz, www.decrapave.com  (just a little hacked site!), www.econohonda.com , www.gghydrotherapy.co.nz , www.loveinsantafe.com , www.tahosp.org.nz (another little hacked site)

OsCommerce

www.celt.co.nz , www.hdtvstorage.com , www.primedigitalsystems.com 

Simple Machine Forums (SMF)

www.tearoha.com  (also integrated the mySQL database with coppermine photo gallery)

Wordpress

www.alphatan.co.nz , www.celt.co.nz/blog , www.ducatiracing.co.nz , www.lukejameson.co.nz , www.pacclub.co.nz , http://primedigitalsystems.com.au/news/, www.timmcarthur.co.nz

Sites I’ve done a lot of work on

www.celtic-connexions.com 

Sites we also host

www.equineadvantage.co.nz , www.geometrix.co.nz, www.worldofwomin.com

Arrgh.  Acer Extensa laptop owning customer’s hard drive failed so I replaced the drive.  XP recovery cd would not boot up so I went into the bios to change the boot order.  Or rather I tried too, but the Bios bleated about a password.  Quickly rung up customer who told me that Heathcote’s must have set the password (thanks!) a few years ago when they reinstalled XP. 

Not a problem thinks I, I’ll remove the CMOS battery and all will be sweet.  Except it wasn’t.  I seems that Acer laptop’s store the password on Eprom.  Eprom’s are like elephants..only their memory lasts longer.  Gah.  Acer also appear to be very tight-lipped about how to reset the BIOS password.  They claim it’s to render stolen laptops useless but some may say it’s more to do with the large amount of money they charge when you have to send the laptop back to them.  Two hours of trawling Google just brought fruitless results.  With nothing to lose I resorted to pulling various cords and jumpers and another hour later I had it figured out.  What a nightmare

When signing up to websites, I normally use a unique email address.  This enables me to identify which companies are selling my email address.  Imagine my surprise when spam started appearing last week to an email address I’d used when signing up to the Seagate (hard drive manufacturers) website.  Naughty monkeys.

Well I should be a happy bunny.

Have switched call providers to ihug.

Good points

1. 10 bucks per month to divert all my calls to the Vodafone moby will save about $150 per month.
2. 20 bucks per month for unlimited national calls will save me about $50 per month
3. Free broadband (ok, I spent an extra 10 bucks for a 5GB data cap) will save me $30 per month.

Bad Points

1. With less than 50 days remaining on my 12 month contract, Orcon are charging me $150 to disconnect.  Would have thought they could have done it on a pro-rata basis or something.  Bunch of arse.
2. As with Orcon, the 161 / 162 call divert service does not foward the CLI (caller’s phone number) to the number it’s being diverted to.  In laymans terms, this means that if someone rings my home phone and I’ve diverted it to my moby, then all i’ll see when the moby rings is my home phone number instead of theirs.  The workaround for this is to prefix the call divert number and then the call will be billed through Telecom New Zealand.  I’m sure it’s not deliberate that you have to make calls through Telecom NZ for this to work……..
3. I’m currently diverting calls to a Telecom mobile as Vodafone New Zealand coverage is VERY patchy around here.  To get the free call divert to my moby it’ll have to be Vodafone so patchy calls it will be then!

Well, I wanted to offer my customers fianance on their IT purchases.  Tried GE Money this morning.  First I was given 0800 787 767, then after 2 transfers I was told 0800 659 053, then 0800 500 505 and finally 0800 802 702 before I was transferred to umm…nobody, she’d hung up before the transfer took place.  15 minutes of my life wasted.  Needless to say I took my business elsewhere.

Well the new boxes arrived in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago and I’ve got just one left.  I didn’t bother taking a snap of the Disk Station this time as it’s exactly the same as the Diskstation DS207 with the exception of an eSATA port.  The box is pretty much identical as well, it’s just got some blue writing.

My not so scientific “testing” of it has revelaed that backing up the unit to eSATA is around 3 or 4 times faster than via USB. Not that this makes any difference to me as I do network backups. Network transfer times on the 207+ seem to be a wee bit quicker (maybe 20%) than the DS207. This has probably a lot to do with the faster processor (500Mhz as opposed to old 266Mhz). I’ve only ever sold the 128MB verison of the 207 so I’d guess the performance imporovement over the standard 64MB one would be even more so.

I’ve not had many problems (touch wood) with the DS207’s (unlike the D-link 323’s I’ve flogged) and most customers seem pleasantly surprised at the functionality in them. Performance wise, they’re not a patch on the ReadyNAS or the DS407’s but then again they’re a cheap as chips 2TB RAID server!. For most home and small office users they’re more than adequate.

One customer reported an issue using the USB print server function but then again I’ve had similar issues with the ReadyNAS (yep, I’ve tried connecting to it via http). My guess is that this is more of a Microsoft Windows issue than anything else as there are reports of other linux print servers being slow or losing print jobs sent by MS Windows clients.

I’d like a bigger gap between the fan and the hard drives to reduce noise (some users replace the fan with a larger but slower rotating one) and I still think the white case looks cheap and plastic.

Another review of the DS207+

Here’s another review of the DS207+

Want one?

I’d be interested to hear comments on them…good and bad!

Thanks to Bob, the top geezer at Celtic connexions in Hamilton I’ve acquired a lovely new Banjo. Now I just need to learn how to play this bad boy. Don’t expect recordings of my musical attempts any time soon.

Oh, I was also able to buy some Irn Bru off him. Dunno if he’ll import motorcycle kneesliders with Scottish flas on them. He muttered something about them being “tacky”.

I LIKE Yahoo mail. I’ve recommended it to customers for years and have been using it myself for umm…yonks. I imagine Yahoo will be left seething after Telecom New Zealand’s complete stuff up of migrating existing Xtra webmail user accounts over to Yahoo mail. What a PR nightmare for Yahoo and I can only image the Google pixies are grinning behind their workstation screens. Perhaps that’s why Xtra and (Microsoft) MSN split too? Surely one of their high heid yin’s should have appeared on the telly apologising for the complete stuff up.

Xtra’s customer service has hit a new low in my opinion. Just when I thought over the last few months that things were improving. This week I’ve given up trying to contact them whilst at customer premises, for the moment all I can do is take the customer account details and then ring up Xtra back in my workshop. I’m glad I’ve got a hands free speakerphone as for the third time this week I’ve been put on hold for over 1.5 hours…yes…you did read that correctly. I guess we should all be glad they appear to have abandoned the awful Jazz music. At least when you ring Xtra’s 0800 number you don’t get the bloody robot that greets you on Telecom’s 123 customer service. They must have trained it for kiwi unglush as it only seems to understand the phrase “talk to a human”. Gimmie a call centre in Bangalore any day of the week.

I’ve got two questions for Xtra.

1. Why can’t a forgotten ADSL password be generated via a webpage or telephone handset keypad tones after answering a few security questions? Come to think of it, maybe the smarty pants Telecom robot could interrogate forgetful customers.
2. Why can’t their call-centre software give an estimated waiting time or position in the queue. Would it be too hard to take customers details and call them back if they’ve been waiting more than 5 minutes?

A few peeps are also upset that our glorious communications monopoly is moving services offshore.