Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been having network problems with my iMac, and, horror of horrors, have even reverted to my XP running laptop instead. No, I’m going to stop myself right here. It’s not that painful for me to switch back to Windows as I use it all day at work, and my reliable Dell Inspiron kicks in and connects more or less every time I switch it on. I’ve only had the blue screen of death once, and that was because Norton had decided to kill it, not Mr Gates’ wonder emporium. I had offended the omni-present satan of anti-virus software by daring to install a Nod32 product and merely ‘uninstalling’ Norton’s evil equivalent first. Silly me. Nod32 is a far superior product by the way – I think it’s technically called ESET Smart Security – and I urge anyone who’s still using Norton, McAfee and whatever other rubbish is out there to investigate more on their website. If you’re looking for a way to rid yourself of all things Norton – check out the Norton Removal Tool.

So, back to my Mac… I’ve been experiencing very crap reception to my wireless network (provided by a Netgear DG834GT wireless router), and just before the weekend, I started getting the dreaded message ‘There was an error connecting to the Airport network…’. It could see the network, and others, but it just wouldn’t connect. I’m a Mac beginner, and had no idea how to solve it. My laptop, my iPhone, and the other PC in the house were all connecting fine, a good job, because I used them to trawl the forums for answers.

Nothing.

Today, having bunked off work early to go and pick up my foreign currency for my rather exciting holiday next week, I had a couple of hours to spare and decided to solve it. I lugged the whole thing downstairs to right next to the router. It could see it, but it couldn’t connect. I figured it wasn’t a problem with the Airport card.

I restrict access to my wireless network by MAC address, so Just for a quick try I deleted the iMac’s MAC address from the approved list on the router, and then re-entered it. I don’t know why, but it worked. Full reception, no problems. Obviously now I’ve moved the whole set up back upstairs, the reception’s gone rubbish again, but at least I can check Facebook now.

I’ll worry about the rest of it later…

Well it seems to work, but typing on this keyboard, particularly in bed, is a bit tricky…

Full review to follow, but for now, for the benefit of Rowan, here’s a picture of our friend Rob taken at Emma’s house on Saturday night. Rob’s an artistic sort of chap (some would say special) and had decided to represent us all in musical form on Emma’s piano. I think this one was Emma…

If you’re looking for a decent service provider, you could do a lot worse than opting for PlusNet. Yes, there are cheaper options out there, and there are providers (Sky most notably) who will tempt you with glamourous extras like being able to watch Extreme Makeover – Home Edition on UKTV Style. Well it would tempt me.

But for one reason, and one reason only, I’m sticking with PlusNet. Customer Service. Let me explain…

I’ve been running my website for a couple of years on my freely available PlusNet webspace. It’s worked for me. But in the last few months I’ve realised that writing and publishing plain HTML is no longer giving me the sort of flexibility I want. I tried learning PHP, but I got bored, so I learnt how to install Wordpress instead. Bingo! Good looking website with huge flexibility and very little actual coding.

Actually, installing Wordpress on my PlusNet CGI space proved a bit more difficult than I’d been promised, so I’ll write a whole post on that at some point. Suffice to say that the first time I tried it, I didn’t do it very well. I wanted to point my domain at it, but it didn’t seem to work.

Yesterday, being the Sunday of a bank holiday weekend, I was a bit bored. I thought I’d see if I could ‘fix’ the problem I’d been having. Ended up deleting the whole thing and starting again (it was rubbish anyway). Wipe MySQL database, reinstall Wordpress, the lot. Decide now is the time to get it all under my domain.

PlusNet have a members area, sort of like a users portal, where you can go for help. I must admit, the fact that you have to trail through the not very helpful ‘Help Assistant’ before they’ll let you raise a ticket is quite annoying, but here’s why I like it so much.

At 7pm on Sunday 24 August, the Sunday before a Bank Holiday, the customer service team’s average response time was (wait for it) one hour and nine minutes. That’s just about enough time for me to go downstairs, order a curry, watch TV while it’s delivered, eat it, and go back upstairs.

PlusNet, I salute you.