Friday, August 03, 2007

Into the Fast Lane?

Now that I'm more settled in my new home and my dear step-daughter is leaving today - such a loss - my brain is slowly beginning to clear. I have many things to do over the next few months. First on the agenda is something a bit scary. Scary but not, I'm sure, all that complicated except to someone like myself. For I'm entirely self-taught on computers and only know what I can already do.

I'm talking about the apparently 'simple' step of upgrading my internet access to broadband. Which is what I'm poised to do this afternoon, armed with a wireless hub and a flimsy instruction booklet in several languages. It should be easy enough, I know. But of course I'm using a Mac rather than a PC, and we've been having problems with the phone line ever since moving in, and according to Murphy's Law 'what can go wrong will go wrong' etc.

So if you never hear from me again, you'll know what happened.

2 comments:

Anne said...

And?

Hope it all went painlessly, but the radio silence is disconcerting.

Jane Holland said...

It didn't go painlessly, alas. It went horribly wrong. The @!&*@ people who sold me the broadband package swore blind that I'd be able to receive my old demon account emails as normal after the transition. This was a lie. Installing the new broadband package (NOT with Demon - that was a mistake) wiped out my ability to connect to the net via Demon and receive my emails from that account on my main Mac computer.

This is because I now have a new IP address and the Demon account, naturally, was using the old IP address.

I finally managed to connect to the net using the old dial-up service via my laptop, but it's a crap laptop and fiddly to use. Being a Windows laptop (@*&!!&@), it madly insisted on downloading all last week's emails - over 500 of them - and then kept interrupting that process to 'log off' mysteriously in order to receive Windows Vista downloads. I spent ages searching for a way to stop it doing that, but couldn't find one.

Then, every time the laptop rebooted, it would start the 500+ email download again from email number one, regardless of how many had already been received before it was interrupted.

Argh!

I tried to access my emails remotely at the Demon website but for some reason my pop3 password was not being accepted. Having now managed, sheepishly, to talk to someone at Demon about the problem, I now have to reset my password over the phone with them and - hopefully! - be able to access my 'poetrycornwall' account emails remotely via the Demon website, rather than doing battle with the evil laptop again.

Of course, I could just change my email address to the new one associated with my broadband package. But I LOVE my Demon account and really regret choosing a different service provider for broadband.

So it's been a bad 24 hours, internet-wise!

But thanks for caring, Anne ... do keep coming back!

Jx