Posts from October 2008

More Lies: Revenge of the Stupid

So after the post titled Why Do People Lie, I continued to phone Virgin to chase them and on my final call of the day I got put through to the installation manager for our area, although he was actually quite possibly the tea boy in the office.

He gave me some story that the first guy should have done the cabling inside the house and left the outside part for another crew: Contrary to the engineers comments that if he did the work he would have to mark the install as completed hence making it very difficult to get someone out to finish the job.

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Why Do People Lie?

So the guy from Virgin Media just came to install our 20MB broadband and phone…..hang on a minute I said to him: You shouldn’t need to do anything to the phone as the old BT line is being converted.

In response the guy tells me that actually they will run two cables to the house – One for the phone line which converts at the socket from the fibre/co-ax cable that Virgin put to POTS cabling for regular telephone lines and the other cable they run is for the broadband.

So if this is the case, why did the person at Virgin I spoke to tell the that they old run one cable and that all of the existing BT cabling is used and simply converted over? Why? Lack of knowledge and understanding.

Is a good job that the telephone master socket in the study is in the same place as where the cable modem will be going otherwise I wouldn’t be a happy bunny at this point.

As it happens the guy was very friendly but said he couldn’t do the installation because the person who came from Virgin on Saturday to inspect the existing cabling at the house didn’t actually tell anyone that they would need to run a new cable to the house and he doesn’t have the tools or the kit to perform the installation – Nice work Virgin.

Lets see if they can mange to install the broadband and the phone this afternoon with a new crew without managing to screw up Nicky’s work phone line in the process and let’s see if they manage to remember to bring the NetGear wireless router with them – I’m not sure about that one either!

Wish me luck x

The Case of the Failed Search Index

So last night I setup our archive logs scripts for my PC and Nicky’s laptop because since my Vista rebuild I’ve never reconfigured it.

This morning, Nicky’s laptop ran it’s first log export and I was reviewing the logs to see how things where looking based on the BSOD’s she been getting recently, and I was shocked by the number of red crosses in the log all from the Windows Search Service regarding failed search indexing.

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Using NTBackup in Vista

So it’s official that with all of the nice new features and pretty things in Vista that the new backup utility sucks especially if your interested in scheduling things from the command line.

Reason? The new Vista backup utility only allows you to backup entire volumes or specified mount points using their GUID, so what happens if you want to backup only a few selected folders?

The answer is to use NTBackup from Windows XP or Server 2003, however this isn’t as simple as copying the ntbackup.exe file from the XP System32 directory.

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