May Mailbox: Rural broadband

I would like to respond April’s letter from Chris Joe about the state of New Zealand broadband.

We live three kilometres from Helensville and tried for four years to get wired broadband, but all we could get was dialup. The dialup was so slow that it was faster to take the car to the bank in Orewa than to attempt internet banking. It took 35 minutes just to reach the log in page, just to be told that the page had timed out. It was also impossible to bid on TradeMe, with it taking nearly four minutes to reload a page.

We now have satellite broadband that costs $80 a month and has a 500MB data cap. It is faster than dialup but is still slow when compared with wired broadband in Auckland. And when the weather is bad, we get no internet at all.
Jannet de Ruiter, Helensville

Lasting longer
Geoff Palmer’s April column on the limited life of archived material got me a bit worried, so I fished out one of my very many 4-track stereo, home recorded, 7-inch reel-to-reel tapes from the early 1960s. I played it on my venerable B&O 2000 tape recorder and it still sounded perfect to my old ears.

Geoff claimed tapes like this would only last 20 years, so 50 years seems a very good bonus to me and I think my collection should see me out.

Similarly, the CDs I “archived” my photos to, back in the early ’90s, can still be “played” with no problems – that’s nearly 20 years already.

I feel Geoff is being unduly pessimistic in his forecasts.
Carl Watson, Whakatane

Flash 10 in IE8
It seems to me that the Flash 10 upgrade for IE8 is a problem for everyone who has downloaded and installed it.

Using Microsoft’s email support service (not being inclined to pay a $70 service fee for live support) I checked all settings, uninstalled and reinstalled in Safe mode and loaded Adobe as Administrator, all with no success. The next suggestion was to create a new User Account, download the latest version of IE8, then install the latest Flash 10. This worked and I then had to copy it across to it all the entries in my existing User Account.

I later discovered that if I right-clicked on the IE8 icon in the toolbar, then clicked Run As Administrator, then clicked Continue in the security dialog box, IE8 and Flash operated normally until IE8 was closed. I sent this information to my Microsoft contact who replied, that this shouldn’t happen and I should get their technician to remotely search my computer, and find what was happening. $70 again – not likely.

You would wonder why Microsoft and Adobe haven’t sorted this problem long ago. So many users must have shifted to Firefox or Chrome and gained as a result.
Alister Tompkins, Feilding

Alister wins a Chester Squander notebook bag from Crumpler for letter of the month.

Norton problems
I upgraded from Norton Internet Security 2009 to NIS 2010 in November last year and have experienced problems on numerous occasions on all of my four computers since then. I use a two-year-old Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop with Windows XP Pro and 3GB of RAM.

NIS 2010 intermittently fails to load during start up and then I’m unable to launch the application from either the shortcut or programs menu. Norton Online Support and Autofix diagnoses the problem as antivirus being turned off or auto protect being disabled. The solution provided is to change the settings – if I could only launch NIS to check the settings!

Using online chat with support the tech uninstalled, then reinstalled the application, changed registry settings, and downloaded the updates for the past approximately 60 days – very time consuming and annoying.

NIS 2009 never gave me any trouble and performed well, but NIS 2010 is proving to be a major headache and a waste of time. If I hadn’t recently upgraded and purchased an additional licence, I would now be using another product.
Hennie Human, Takapuna

Security solutions
Thanks for a very useful and timely article on antivirus solutions (February PC World).
At home I use freeware and have been trialling the full version of ZoneAlarm, which includes an antivirus. After the trial ran out I converted to the free Zone Alarm firewall and installed AVG free to run alongside.

However, I’ve found this combination doesn’t work well anymore and slows the PC down dramatically, especially on boot-up and when downloading mail.

Looking for a solution, I came upon Comodo, which I’ve trialled before but never stuck with. It is now my favourite solution for PC security, though of course we users only know how good something is when it fails to deliver.

At work, I think we’ll be opting for Norton Internet Security – based on your review.
Geoff Holmes, Palmerston North