Dull men

[old foolParticipant @old-fool]

Did anyone see “James May & The Dull Men” on telly last night? If you didn’t they are picking up the batten where Heath Robinson left off. Appeals to my sense of the ridiculus

Bob

[David Gibbons 1Participant @davidgibbons1]

I watched it. TBH, I found it, a bit boring, self indulgent and, well, Dull.

[mgnbukParticipant @mgnbuk]

His S7 could do with a new drive belt & the tool was stuck out a bit far.

But, apart from The Repair Shop (occasionally – mainly in the background), where else have you seen a Myford on TV recently ?

Nigel B.

 

 

[File HandleParticipant @filehandle]

I liked it – its different.

[VicParticipant @vic]

Thanks for this Bob, I think …

The programme itself was ok – eventually.

It highlighted a few TV related problems. We have had Virgin cable TV for many years, but I’m thinking of getting rid of it and switching to another Broadband only provider. I checked for Quest on Virgin though and couldn’t see it? I could have sworn it was on there? It didn’t even appear as a greyed out (unavailable) channel.

I then went to very rarely looked at Freeview. Not there either, and I noticed I can only receive BBC TV and Radio channels – I need to look into this!

I then switched to my Amazon Fire stick. Not on there either but Discovery was. They wanted £6.99 a month but at the bottom of the page was a free? “register” option  which I tried and bingo, I was able to watch the programme.

TV programme availability could be a contentious issue indoors if/when we dismiss Virginmedia so this exercise has proved enlightening.

[old foolParticipant @old-fool]

Oh Vic, you seem to be having as many problems as me with the simple task of watching telly. What happened to the days when you switched on and there it was? I only have off-air free view I object to paying for the tripe they feed us! The current high sun-spot numbers is playing hell with it. What I watch is dependant on what is available, not what’s desirable!

[mgnbukParticipant @mgnbuk]

I checked for Quest on Virgin though and couldn’t see it?

Quest HD is Channel 137 on Virgin & shows as included on all tarifs. Quest +1 is Channel 337 – again shows as included in all tarifs. I recorded the program on the Tivo box from Virgin cable TV and, having recently “downgraded” the Virgn TV package to reduce the ever increasing cost, I still have access to Quest HD and +1 on the most basic “Mixit” package. If it is greyed out, you could try enduring a call to 150 to find out why ?

As a company to deal with I tuly dislike Virgin, but the service has been generally reliable & they have always provided the broadband speed I pay for. But I dread the “contract renegoatiations”  and their constant efforts to ratchet up the costs – the price they initially wanted for renewal this time was more than my combined gas & electricity monthly DD ! Packages of phone, TV & broadband are cheaper than broadband alone, even though the phone is so stupidly expensive I don’t use it for outgoing calls. I do now have a cable alternative to Virgin (recently introduced into the area through City Fibre) & seriously considered changing this time despite the inconvenince of loosing e-mail accounts, but eventually managed to get a more palatable deal from Virgin so stayed put – for the next 18 months anyway.

Nigel B.

[old fool]

On old fool Said:

Oh Vic, you seem to be having as many problems as me with the simple task of watching telly. What happened to the days when you switched on and there it was? I only have off-air free view I object to paying for the tripe they feed us! The current high sun-spot numbers is playing hell with it. What I watch is dependant on what is available, not what’s desirable!

Yes agreed. If I wanted to watch all the programmes I’ve seen advertised I’d need to subscribe to at least half a dozen providers at considerable cost. Scrap the TV licence and I may be able to afford a few more. I would NOT subscribe to the BBC.

Thanks Nigel, I’ll have a look. The last time we “renegotiated” (we didn’t want to pay the nearly 20% increase, they cut our Broadband speed and channels. Our BB speed is quite a bit lower than their advertised minimum so I guess they must have some “hobbling” software that cuts the speed for those unwilling to pay a premium?! 😆

[VicParticipant @vic]

Hi Nigel, I found it as you say on 137, the icon was not quite as expected. We’ve found Virgin quite unhelpful at times, particularly with email. We switched our main email addresses to iCloud and get a much more reliable service. When Virgin carry out maintenance on their Mail servers (and don’t tell anyone) we’ve found not being able to access our email accounts for half a day or more quite frustrating. We have City Fibre in our area now and are thinking of making the switch, it’s £29 a month. Virgins minimum is supposed to be M125 which is an average of 132Mbps. We get this, which as you can see has a particularly pitiful upload speed:

 

[mgnbukParticipant @mgnbuk]

Hi Vic,

I have the M350 cable broadband – just checked with an online Speed test & getting 386 mbits down/37 mbits up. I have found that I get over the “rated” service I am contracted to whenever I have tried this, so something seems a bit off with yours ? My cables were originally installed by NTL World, who were taken over by Virgin. My brother, who lives around 6 miles away in an area originally cabled by Blue Yonder (also taken over by Virgin), also finds his broadband tests above the rated speed, so mine seems not to be a fluke – around this bit of West Yorks at least.

The only issue I have had with speed was when I was “upgraded” from 100 to 150 mbits many years ago. When I Speed tested that I was only getting just over 100 mbits after the upgrade. After a lot of time with their help line, it was eventually diagnosed that the issue was my old 100 mbit network card that was throttling the upload – after a change to a 1 gbit card I got above the rated speeds as had previously been the case below 100 mbits.

Not had email access issues either, other than having to get in to my .ntlworld account through the Virgin website after they changed a security setting that disabled access from Thunderbird. Strangely the virgin.net email still works with Thunderbird. After a frustrating hour or more on the phone to the Indian call centre to try to fix things, I declined their offer to remotely rummage around in my pc to try to sort the issue & just log in to my Virgin account now. There was an explanation in a “pc fixers” column in PC Pro magazine last month which explained what Virgin had done, why they had done it and what had gone wrong for many customers, but I will cheerfully admit that the explanation went over my head !

Nigel B.

[Stuart Smith 5Participant @stuartsmith5]

Vic

It looks like your speeds are less than Virgin guarantee. See attached link to their website.

https://www.virginmedia.com/broadband/our-speeds-explained

Might be worth complaining to them.

I have found my speeds to be higher than advertised. Certainly a lot better than the Sky broadband I had before. Open reach have not upgraded the network to full fibre in my area so Virgin is my only realistic choice for fast broadband .

Stuart

[vic neweyParticipant @vicnewey60017]

We were tied to Virgin for years as the only way to get decent Broadband speed, the alternative was via overhead BT lines down our lane coming from the exchange miles away. Last year open Reach upgraded the lines with Fibre Optic and opened up the opportunity to escape Virgin who constantly overcharged us.

Last April we chose Vodaphone full fibre to the house with 200Mb broadband, £32 a month and the landline is included free as it’s voip.(via internet) You do have to pay a fee for making calls or you can pay for anytime calling or evening & weekends.

After a long battle to cancel Virgin we had it connected and it was excellent, yesterday we got a free upgrade to 500Mb and the cost was lowered to £28 per month! extra discount for having 2 mobile phones.

We have TV via roof ariel but also can watch catchup & live TV via the internet.

[Author]

Posts