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Why not buy one of my low-cost "virtual books" that you can download direct to your computer? My books can be read on-screen or printed out on paper. They are full of colour photos and illustrations. Click on "Books", above, for more information.


 

>Sorry to bother you. I am a mac user in suffolk and saw your testimonial
>on the Pipex website. I saw that you use their ADSL xtreme service and
>was wondering what version of Mac OS X you were using.

I currently use OS9.2.2 on my G3/233 and my G4/400. About to upgrade my G4/400 to "Panther". Just ordered an 80Gb hard drive because I want to ensure a truly "clean" install. (2006 I now use the latest OSX in my G4 towers).

Unfortunately I can no longer recommend Pipiex. Pipex worked fine for the first 6 months then the service began to suffer interruptions. They seldom replied to my emails. After 11 months they changed something which meant I could no longer use my old favourite software "Claris Emailer". It took four weeks for them to reply to me by email (via my netcentral dial-up account) and I had to prompt them by faxing over and over just to get that one response which was basically "try the settings we gave you a year ago" - which of course I hadn't changed.

I'm sorry I ever wrote the testimonial. It shows how bad they are, since I've asked them to remove it. They don't even have the courtesy to reply.

I now use Internet Central, which is a BIG company based at Keele University. It started off as a 2-man ISP in Nantwich, Cheshire, and I used them for dial-up from their first year in 1995. The "lad" who was originally the technical whizz kid is now a Director and the company is owned and funded by a large company (possible Fujitsu?) You can trust them.

Just as a test, ring their technical support line (9am-5pm weekdays) and count how many times it rings before they pick up. (01782) 667766

My bet is twice. Compare that with typically 45 minutes on-hold for Pipex. Netcentral don't give much in the way of Mac support. In fact they call me! But it's really not needed.

In addition, on the rare occasion anything does go wrong, they'll have a message on the answerphone within minutes, explaining what is wrong and estimated time before it's fixed. ADSL has gone off once in the past year, for just one hour. In fact it was caused by some twit in Manchester excavating the main "backbone" connection to BT!

Internet Central specialises in business accounts - which is good news because it means that you are not contending with schoolkids all evening. In fact, most businesses stop work in the evening, so it flies. Not that it's slow during the day. It's not. I noticed the difference most when I had dial-up and the schoolkids were on holiday. I could use Netcentral but "Breathe" was useless.

Downtime has been minimal over the last year. Whether you want web space, email or both, they give an excellent service. ADSL goes up to 2Mb/S (dependent on your line quality). I could get 2Mb but I pay only for 256/512 and we run 3 - 4 computers simultaneously off it.

I'm paying about £30 a month for business use but they do a similar "home user" account for £24 or thereabouts. Their web site explains it all.

http://www.internet-central.net/

Another ISP I'm just testing out is:

http://www.betterwebspace.com

They don't do ADSL (yet) but they offer web hosting at just £12 a year (really) starting at 100Mb of space on their server. This includes numerous extras like your own email server with unlimited aliases that you can turn on and off as you wish. They provide a browser front end facility to control everything - including uploading your files to their server! It seems to be a one-man company run by a guy called Kieran. We'll see how it goes. (I did use "Phage" for a year but it was hopeless. Another one-man band running Mac servers but totally unreliable. Paul is a nice guy but just kept making excuses so I quit).

My sons have just started to build their first ever web site on betterwebspace. Take a look at their first 5 hours' work:

http://www.limiter-happy.co.uk

I say 5 hours. It was 5 hours to gather the images and pages together and 5 minutes to upload them (having never done it previously).

Also see my site at http://www.marketingtips.uk.com

Another hosting service I use is http://www.tragicradio.com/hosting.html

They provide hosting on servers in Holland and these are the FASTEST I've ever used! Try this for speed: http://www.satcure.com

Anyway, I'm rambling on a bit!

Let me know if you need further help. Join YMUG. Sign up for MacTalk and for the Mac-L discussion list.

Best Wishes,

Martin


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Updated April 8, 2006
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