As I have blogged, I upgraded my 1stGen Zune 30 to a 3rdGen (at least from what I read the 120 is a gen newer) 120GB Zune.  Admittedly I still fire up my Zune 30 and despite my torture on it, the device still wants to work.  The 120GB is definitely an upgrade, not just in terms of capacity.  The display, which yes it is important on an music player since I watch several regular video podcasts, is sharper.  The start up and synch times are impressive.  Now I will say that I am still getting used to the new navigation mechanism.  I wouldn’t consider this a Zune thing since I really hate that laptops are all using these glide pads, I really miss the pencil eraser.  I turn off the touch sensitivity on the new navigation pad because much like the gas pedal in my vehicle I do not have the finesse touch.  Even with that turned off, navigating through the User Interface is great.  The new Zune120 despite the capacity increase is much more comfortable. 

I upgraded to the premium headphones.  Much like my Zune30 but in much shorter period of time I have already rendered them useless.  The headphones that come with the Zune aren’t bad but I like to play the music very loud and isolating or in-ear are just more polite to those around me.

So, I have been really enjoying my Zune120 and even though my “Plays” (the software keeps track of how many songs you have played) have gone down, that is not because I am using the device but rather I am addicted to Podcasts.  I was already using the Zune 3.0 software and compared to iTunes I love it.

So where is the “More” you ask?  I bought a new Zune8.  Working out with the Zune120 just made me nervous.  I ordered one of the Zune originals with a cool tattoo-like skull etched on the back.  I also ordered the iHome ZN9 alarm clock (which I haven’t really used but already have some reservations about it).  The Zune8 is smaller and lighter but there is no loss in terms of functionality.

I like that all I had to do was connect it, let the Zune software recognize it and away we went.  First thing was to install the firmware upgrade.  Then name it, link it to my gamertag and then pick what I wanted to synch to it.  Obviously I can’t synch everything to it since my collection is well over 40GB, but I was able to get my workout playlist and told it to sync it to LittleZune and as expected it synched the playlist and only the songs that are part of the playlist.  After two workouts this was a good additional to the arsenal.  The only downside is that its so light you almost forget about it.

I do have to point out a bad part of my customer experience.  The ZuneStore’s order tracking is weak, and that’s disturbing since its not like your standard internet purchase with the customization so it would be nice to see where your order is at in the fulfillment process.

With all of the rumors about the Zune failing and maybe being discontinued.  I sure hope that is just people over-reacting.  I love my Zune players and think they are as good as the competition if not better in many respects.  If anything does happen, I sure hope the Zune software does not experience a demise.  The software is clean and the marketplace is well done. 

http://social.zune.net/member/jkavanagh58

Well if nothing they are consistent.  There have been two NHL oriented video games on the market (unlike the NFL that EA owns all rights to).  I have stuck with the 2K line because the EA products are just not realistic or playable.  I have been enjoying NHL 2K9 and had a pretty good first year going in franchise mode.  Three weeks from the playoffs and now I can’t play or even simulate the next game.  I have tried several times, then popped the power, re-seated the hard drive, cleaned up several gigabytes of disk space.  Since Fallout 3 crapped out on me today I started thinking about upgrading to the Elite console.  Then I did some research and it would appear this is common with the game and not the console type.  2K Sports has stated that they will not release a patch.  I had this problem with the 2K7 version.  Shame.

A sucker for beta stuff, I have been using IE8 for some time.  It was definitely beta, crashing with some regularity (although it was pretty good at recovering).  I of course jumped on the IE8 RC 1 when it became available.  Interesting note on that, I follow technology specific RSS feeds constantly but the first whiff if IE 8 RC1 being available was via Twitter.  The RC 1 is very solid, to date it has only crashed with poor websites, not something I would blame a browser on.  Working on a little project I have been experimenting with CSS and I was able to crash IE8 beta 2 consistently with my lousy CSS but now RC1 seems to ignore my malformed CSS.  All in all I am liking the Release Candidate version.

One thing that I have not tried with IE8 is the “Accelerators”.  Doing some research on a topic I tried the map accelerator.  Definitely well done.  On the page I highlighted the City and State (the breeder did not post the full postal address), used right-click and then let the cursor hover over “Map with Live Search” and wala…. a map shows up in a new window as shown below:

If you click on the option, as you would expect, it takes the selected text and opens maps.live.com to the location.  I prefer Live Maps (not to mention the whole Windows Live Platform) but if you check www.ieaddons.com and check out mapping there is an accelerator for some other mapping services (Google, Yahoo, multimap, etc…).

Another group of accelerators that I came across and has proven quite handy is the Sharing or Social Networking, as there are accelerators for Sharing links or data found on a website using your Facebook, Twitter or other social network.

Check out the video for more information than I can give.

Off to do more testing.

Okay, so all of this blogging, micro-blogging, social networking it is all just a blur.  I have pretty much stuck with the Windows Live platform but working in Information Technology you always hear the chatter.  Interesting twist to that is IT is normally the group that prevents you from accessing these types of services.  That in reality is a shame but a necessary evil I suppose.  So, Twitter is a “micro-blogging” platform.  I looked into it and at first I just didn’t get to it.  I did like the fact that I could post with a simple SMS text message.  The key is you have to start following people.

Twitter alone is just a plain (although you can use Twitbacks to customize it) web page listing all of the threads.  Installing an app like thwirl makes it easier to use.  There are plenty of apps for your iPhone and Blackberry as well.

Linking it all together, my home.live.com gets updated with my Twitter activity and I have Facebook setup so when I post a twitter entry it updates my Facebook status as well.

Determined to figure out why tweeting is all the rage… I looked further and trust me this is in now way an authoritative document but I found a way to make it really work for me.  I explored http://search.twitter.com ; again a very generic looking web page but enter a topic.  In this case I will use Twitter to monitor chatter about my favorite hockey team. 

Okay so now with these results you can:

• Find twitter accounts you want to follow.  Sure there will be lots of yapping but then you start to see a twitter account that you want to “follow”
• See the RSS icon… and I do love RSS; subscribe to the feed and use your RSS Read (Windows Live Mail for me) or use the URL and plug it into my.live.com

I am using Twitter to follow topics of Powershell and Zune right now and I have to admit it has been informative and when I posted that I was struggling with Powershell and SQL, I receive some very informative responses.  That is one of the reasons I hate that we can’t access it from work because it does have some benefits, but I am sure it would be abused more than correctly leveraged.

The highly anticipated beta was in so much of demand getting it was not easy.  I still laugh at those complaining, I remember when a Beta was only released to circles such as Technet and MSDN, which come at a cost.  Okay, enough about that.

I used an old laptop for this testing.  Irony is this is the same laptop I did Vista beta testing for.  For Vista it was a dog but functional.  The machine is starting to show its age with the hard drive and optical drive having issues from time to time.  In the last two years I have been using this for all of my Linux testing and at the time I did a restart to install Windows 7 the machine was running Ubuntu.

Install:  One word; WOW.  The install process was so much quicker, quicker than Windows as well as Linux (GUI assisted install).  This was a complete new install, to include wiping out the drive contents, so with a bare drive and no OEM drivers Windows 7 installed and came up with no issues.  No special hardware on this laptop but it is not necessarily current.  I have not found any hardware that did not work.

I love that Powershell is installed and now I will have to start learning Powershell V2 since in a professional capacity I have been pushing hard to learn Powershell V1 to deploy in a production environment.

First task was to install Windows Live Essentials.  This made the process of setting up the machine so much faster.  For starters getting the primary tools I use installed, then the content.  Just consider the Favorites Synch… it prompted me if I wanted to enable this function, turned it on, and I now have all of the favorites I use on a daily basis… no export/import just sit back and watch the folder content populate.

A few updates came up during my first login session, before the haters start making an issue of that… I have spent several weeks installing OSX and various Linux distros… they all do the same thing (Fedora consistently would blow up after the third bath of updates scrambling the display making it unusable).

Used the Homegroup function to share files… not bad for a free P2P function but with Mesh and Skydrive I will probably not use it.

Several articles have been written about the Taskbar.  I don’t like the spacing of the icons but the interaction is great. One of the interactions I liked was with IE running and several sites in tabs, when I move the mouse over the IE icon each tab is shown.  Annoyance for Windows Live Messenger it shows two items .

Like most of the complaints I hear about Vista, I was at first not happy with it but after using it I found it was just different and once I used it in normal activities I can see its benefits.

Bouncing around from one application to another, the OS is extremely quick and very stable.  I will not be replacing my large screen laptop with this unit but this might be my road warrior.  I admit, Vista on my main laptop has been great, IE8 was frustrating at first but it seems to be more stable.  Admitting I like Vista I have to say that once available and based on current testing, I will be upgrading to Windows 7.  Next to test, Zune; Importing Media (camera); scripting (Powershell… and hey vbscript shows version 5.8 very interesting); Media Center; an office application (probably OpenOffice since I can’t afford another Microsoft Office license) and more Windows Live Essential testing.

Okay, so along the lines of “google it” there is the “subscribe through iTunes”.  I get that the market is full of iTunes but there are other players.  Yeah, I destroyed an iPod a few years ago, not a negative review I just have that effect.  What really makes me laugh is most of the Podcasts I listen to are orientated around Microsoft products since that is how I make my living in large part. 

Thinking about it, the podcast feature is still a fairly new function within Zune and from some feedback I have received the feature might not be international.  In addition, the Zune marketplace has a substantial list of Audio and Video podcasts.  Admittedly I did not go too far beyond that at first.  Then I stumbled upon the “Add Podcast” button when you are looking at the Podcast section within your collection.

The process is similar to subscribing to RSS feeds for Windows Live Mail, my.live.com, Outlook, iGoogle, etc…. Finding a podcast can be the other issue.  Many sights that have an associated Podcast are now showing a link for that.  Additionally there are websites that serve as a type of Yellow Pages for Podcasts.  I have been using http://www.digitalpodcast.com/ .  So you come across a podcast you are interested in, you check the entries' details and you click on the “How to subscribe to this show”.  The causes a popup window showing the full URL to the show.  Copy that string and go back to you Zune software.  Find the “Add Podcast” when you click that button, it too will produce popup which looks like:

Paste the URL in the text box, click subscribe and if the URL is valid you will see it register, the podcast information will populate the details section and then if its an active Podcast it will start downloading the episodes (the number of episodes will be based on your base settings, I use a conservative setting of 3 shows).

This was just one way to get podcasts onto your Zune.

Someone else in my "Windows Live Network" had posted something on this a few weeks ago, but I just saw it.  Doing a search for a current project I was scrolling through the results and noticed a strange graphic appear to the right of each search result... it looked something like:

The vertical line with a diamond centered within it.  What could this be?  Well I think its a very handy little feature.  Normally the search results read the pages "description" element and display that, which can be misleading.  So I moved the cursor to the diamond and a new layer displays to the right and it simply (but cleverly) displays a more realistic snippet of the links contents.  I have highlighted in yellow the text I am referring to, it doesn't really display with a yellow background.

Now I just wish all of these podcasts and radio shows who claim to be all about technology would stop defaulting to "just google it".

Headed off to work and realized I forgot to pack my Zune.  Considering the affect snow had on the traffic, turning around to get it was out of the question.  Then I started seeing all of the reports of Zunes locking up.  A few days ago I posted about my self-gifting, and it would seem I did myself a favor.  The problem being experienced is that the 1stGen (aka Zune30) as of this morning will not finish the boot process.  Of course as soon as I got home I dug up my old Zune just to see…  This could get very ugly.   Theory is this is all because of the leap second added for this year and it ties into a clock being added to the Zune with the most recent firmware.  Hopefully come midnight the devices will be back up and running.

And then the news about Time Warner cable.  So I had heard that in this area they have just raised rates by a considerable chunk, and they are pretty “matter of fact” about it when customers have asked why.  Now all of the TWC customers are seeing a crawler that as of midnight all Viacom channels will no longer be available.  Now this is interesting, the reason, Viacom wants TWC to pay more (essentially raising their rates like TWC already did for their customers) and TWC refuses to pay.  Uverse isn’t great but I save money and get better customer support.

So is the government not seeing this?  They have protected these cable companies with regulation, allowing these companies to practice complete control over their customers with no real fear of competition.  Yes there are alternatives but, all of these broadband companies run over the same lines, why shouldn’t the consumer have a choice.  It is these same types of practices that have created this economy. 

I love this, creative kids prove how deeply these systems are problematic….

Bury Your Enemies in Speeding Tickets

While concealing my identity so no one would know I acquired an old Mac Mini.  I certainly wasn’t going to pay full price.  The goal was to have a machine I could test Windows Live Mesh and Windows Live Synch…  The unit is an older PowerPC unit and I quickly found out that it is pretty limited.  If anything it was a good distraction from a weekend of script writing, troubleshooting Windows Update all in an effort to get all of our servers patched with this latest IE7 release. 

Well it looks like I will have to do some digging but it does not appear I can use this unit for the purpose I intended.  Cool form factor on the machine but for now it will stay powered off.  I will say that the keyboard I bought for this unit is great.  I love the little metal sheet with keys on it, just needs an insert key.  I like it so much I plugged my Trackball into it and using it for my real computer.

I have read lots of complaints about the Windows Live Hotmail release.  Other than keeping that legacy “Hotmail” as part of the product name is my only real complaint.  I don’t like that they removed the arrows to allow quick emptying of Deleted Items and Junk Mail but minor details.  I can send and receive email.  Hotmail still gives me a decent email platform that not only allows the basics of email (hey I am okay with mailx for the price – which is why I used the tacked green on black template for my gmail) plus has the skills to do some pretty cool formatting.

I loved Outlook Express, then the first release of Windows Live Mail was cool, I was disappointed with the next version, but this most recent release….. excellent.  I love Outlook, but in a corporate email environment, using it with the Live Mail Connector just seems like overkill.  This new version has a cleaner yet more substantial look.  Performance is great and the Feed synchronization (and I am addicted to RSS) works without fail.  It will take some time getting used to “Sync” versus “Send/Receive” but maybe an old dog can learn a new trick.

Okay it is only day one but….

One thing that has not changed is the version of software.  The only low spot in this process was the synchronization failed to add almost 100 songs.  This is really odd since 95% of my collection is comprised of tracks downloaded using my Zune Pass.  No doubt the issue is maintaining the media rights which we all know who we have to blame for that.  The silver lining was I cleaned up my collection and in a few cases removing one album only lead me to get a better version (one with bonus tracks or no censoring, etc….).  With the additional storage I did tweak my settings for a few Podcasts (Powerscripting, Military Channel, X-Play….) to store more than three editions.

So the device….. despite 4 times the capacity this unit is slightly smaller and lighter, in general more comfortable in the hand as well as in a pocket.  The navigation pad, which I was skeptical about, is a very nice feature.  On the 1st Gen devices the navigation wheel was flush to recessed and worked very well.  The navigation … well its not a circle so it is much more of a “pad” than a wheel.  I turned of the feature that responded like a trackpad type use for a more conventional approach.  Interface, although a clearer picture was no different so nothing to learn.  I have not found the equalizer controls yet but in general the audio sounded better.  Loading of songs and videos is faster but we are talking milliseconds so still can’t knock the 1st Gen.  Battery life seems better but it will take more than one day of testing to verify that.

Wireless operation was a little quicker as well for both the synchronization as well as the connecting to Zune marketplace.  I still love the feature.  Since Zunes are still pretty rare I don’t get much opportunity to wireless zune to zune but since my Zune 30 is partially operable I may have to test that.

The headphones… seem to be the same as 1stGen; not bad but not great.  Now considering I have some Bose QC3’s that probably isn’t fair but the included headphones are light, weighty enough that they are not flimsy and constantly tangling, but light enough to wear while walking or busy working.

This type of device is very important to me and I have to say this was money well spent.

So, above is my collection in chronological order from left to right (iRiver H300, Zune 30 and Zune 120).  Each successor was a little better but all three were very good devices.  I will say that one of my detractions from the Zune and iPod is you are buying these large hard drives, why not allow (without some potentially damaging hack) the buyer to use them for storage of files?  I still use my iRiver as external drive to backup files.

Okay, I haven’t had much chance to use the new Windows Live software.  However while prepping for another blog entry I had an occasion to use the new Windows Live Photo Gallery.  As I posted before the new home.live.com design is pretty cool, including the mini photo gallery.  Then while publishing new photos to Facebook I noticed the “Publish” menu included some new items.  When I tried the “Online Album” it generates a new windows and provides with your various online photo albums.  The “Home Page photos” caught my attention, so let’s try.  I uploaded a picture to that album then went back to my http://home.live.com and the collection of pictures scrolling amongst the header increased by one.  Very cool.

Well I had to self-gift this year.  Yesterday I trashed my Zune.  I dropped it and had some wishful thinking.  When I was done with the lab tests and was waiting to see the doctor, I tested to see if it was still working.  I tried to load one of the games to pass the time, the little loading animation just kept going, I must admit it is mesmerizing, but the game never loaded.  I fired up a Podcast and it played.  Today however I noticed that it would skip certain songs and was unexpectedly rebooting more than normal.

I had been considering buying one of the newer smaller models that I could use specifically for working out.  I loved my Generation 1 Zune 30 and since the Zune software worked seamlessly even with the older device.  Even when considering upgrading my main unit, I was never interested in the higher capacity models not to mention 120GB????  Well, I had to have my music (oh yeah the place is going nuts where I work due to the recent Internet Explorer exploit, don’t get me started).  So I started checking around never even considering the 120GB model. 

Well they (Best Buy) were making an offer I couldn’t refuse.  Okay for starters I looked at the 80GB but to get another 40GB was a relatively small bump, what I also noticed was that when you buy the 120GB model you get the Home A/V Kit free.  Sure a MRSP $60 is cool, but I had been eyeing the product for over a year.  With all of the iPODs out there, the collection of accessories is extensive but not much for the Zune.  For example the stereo units with the iPOD dock built in.  Yes I can plug my Zune in using the Aux port but without the dock there is no power source, plus no remote control.  So this accessory gives me that not to mention not a bad looking piece of gear for my desktop.

Plugged the Zune in, Zune software recognized it and then started the setup process.  Automatically detected it needed the most recent version of firmware.  Firmware installed and now synchronizing my collection of music, pictures, etc….  So now I wait.

I also have to say that the product packaging, and this was true with the first one as well, is excellent!

http://social.zune.net/member/jkavanagh58

Okay this is just rambling.  I am keeping my disgust with all of this bailout business but just a thought that maybe those giving my money out need to recognize.  What is really lost in all of the talk about failing mortgages and the resultant credit freeze is why are people unable to pay their bills.  Sure there is no excuse for all parties involved when people were buying homes they had no business buying.  The problem is the real issue is being ignored.  To get a quick sense of the issue, check out the activity on the professional networking sites.  Social networks such as Windows Live and Facebook get all of the attention but LinkedIn is a social network for professional use.  It has been around for quite some time.  I joined up a long time ago, so long ago I had to remember back to what password I was using back then when I recently received a join request.  People are trying to build these connections because the job market more than the investment market has faltered.  I don’t mean to offend any readers from countries other than the United States, but companies are faltering because since we have been farming out all of our labor, we can no longer afford to consume their products.  This has been going on for some time, it has just become large enough that the problem has crept into the gated communities.  I don’t have the answers, but I read of a CEO who was fired from one company after they could no longer take hits on their stock price, is hired to be a CEO of another company.  Companies only concern themselves with stock price and investors only care about P/E; the quality of the product or service is not even a consideration. 

The Auto makers????  I have bought a specific brand since I could afford it (take note of that).  I was not so naive to completely believe I was buying American but I figured at least part of my purchase was patriotic.  I love my truck but I am certain that very little of it was made in America, hence workers were not making money in this country to pay their mortgage and consume.  Yeah I am anti-union and the American workforce in general is responsible for part of the issue, but these millionaires and billionaires have control.  They can whine about the cost of labor but they are not suffering through the hard times, especially with the government giving them money to play with.  Companies like Nike, Levi’s Walmart wrap themselves in the stars and stripes but other than high-end positions they are doing nothing but stealing from us.

I am just a jarhead, none of that fancy book-learning (another big issue in the job market). but you can only withdraw from a fixed source for a fixed period of time; the well is dry and it has nothing to do with “Credit Markets”!

On notification of this post I installed the new applications.  At first glance, the aesthetics make the upgrade worth the time.  Live Mail and Messenger work as expected, will continue to test.  I must say I am a huge fan of the Windows Live Mail client but it will take some time to get used to the language change since sync seems foreign in regards to email versus Send/Receive. http://download.live.com

Since I mentioned how I use my.live.com as my start page it only seems fitting to pass this one on.  I never understood the whole podcast thing but when Zune integrated them into the marketplace I have to admit I got hooked on a few.  The best of course are the video podcasts.  Channel 10 and G4TV are part of the morning routine.

my.live.com as I understand it when you look at all of the services within the Windows Live framework is part of search.live.com (hence why I do not believe it was included in the “Wave 3” rollout).  I have been using live.com as my search engine for a few years now.  Like any search engine it took some time for it to amass content, be refined, tweaked etc.  I would do the query on live and then perform the same exact query on one of the other search engines.  I don’t use Farecast but Cashback is pretty cool.  They didn’t touch on the “Medical” search, which if you had read back to the very first post on my Live Space that was the whole purpose of me starting this blog.  Check out the video if you are not familiar with Live Search. 

Live Search New Features - Fall Update

I have to admit that with the new security I don’t get to use much of the new Live stuff.  I understand that the new security was to keep the spammers and such out so no big deal.  Reading all of these complaints though I just have a few comments.

In a few areas I think this rollout dropped the ball.  However these areas are just niceties and considering I pay how much for this service (NOTHING) why get mad about it.

Yeah, I find home.live.com to be too busy but let’s face it the concept is not new ala MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc… and the complaints about displaying names and data…. for starters it is a social network, if you want tight security and anonymity stay off the grid.  Not being harsh but if you want to blog but none of the other stuff, setup a wordpress.org account or install wordpress to your current hosting (not to push a product just the one that comes to mind).  I have never been fond of how “Friends” were collected, displayed (ie. no sort) but it worked.  Sure there were some fake users looking to SPAM, I figured it out and whacked them from my account.  I would agree that the aesthetics of Hotmail (cmon Microsoft can we not dump that legacy name?) degraded with the latest version but it is still usable and considering you can use Windows Live Mail and even Microsoft Outlook you have plenty of options for a free service.

All in all I see a ton of work (which I could not do myself) that has been provided as a framework.  It looks better than the alternatives and in actuality it works better than the alternatives.  As I have seen in the short time within the Live Clubhouse community when the input has been constructive we have either received a response or seen changes.  If this were my company and you just wanted to bash what you are getting for free I would have to think twice about devoting resources to it.

So now where I see this rollout missed….

I love the header on home.live.com, the dynamic themes and the concise but personalized data (date, weather, message ticker, calendar item) is just great… BUT why is it not consistent when I go from one to another not to mention why is it not included with my.live.com (which personally I live and die with that as my internet start page)?  Oh yeah, why is home.live.com setup with some interval of auto-refresh?

Headlines… I can customize what headlines display but I can’t (maybe I just haven’t figured out how) remove the stupid default MSN/MSNBC content????

Data duplication; in conjunction with the headlines not above, why not use the content I have in my.live.com?  On the home.live.com I can add my favorite movies, music (why by artist, why not song) and books.  Spaces provided pre-formatted lists which as I recall is in an XML format, why no option to just bring that data into home.live.com?

Again things that frustrate me but not something I am about to get angry about or quit because they changed it without asking me.  I have worked in the computer field for some time now.  The reason I have stayed is because of the “new stuff” and sometimes you get real disappointed because you anticipate the next version, then you get your hands on it and it has changed radically.  However I have found that in most cases you get over “I used to be able” and say “oh cool, this is odd but now that I think of it this way is better”.

Okay, so considering the market fiasco currently going on, when I read that AT&T is going to layoff 12,000 I was appalled.  That all of these financial geniuses haven’t realized the true crux of this issue is amazing.  Keep giving the people who created this mess more money, yeah that will help. 

So, when I moved into my new digs one of the issues I debated was which service to use for TV, Internet and Phone.  I had been a faithful customer of a Cable company but the rates kept going up, they advertise these great rates but the kicker is you have to sign a 2 year contract, and getting customer service was awful (hmmmm why? because the rich execs need to cut “costs” and we can rely on the majority of our customers just putting up with it so lets cut the human factor from our expenses).  I planned on transferring my service.  To make a long story short, of three installation appointments a Time Warner Cable representative never darkened my door.  One of the contractors showed up a few weeks later with the new Data/Voice modem.  Matter of fact I had several of their cables (to my house as well as neighbors) running through my yard and they refused to bury them until I threatened to cut them.

I have read about UVerse, and being a geek it was intriguing.  Somehow my development is within this 2% area that is covered by their full UVerse (IPTV) service.  They offered some lucrative incentives to go with their service and there was not contract.  In general it is cheaper, and the longer I have it they are really proving you get what you pay for.

My cable wasn’t perfect but…. Despite claims of Fiber Optic networks, the service is just DSL, only now you are strapping TV, Data and Voice over it.  At least once a week, you will hear this click sound, TV freezes, computers all show limited connectivity… check out their Residential Gateway and all of the LEDs are out except for the little red one.  Eventually a follow-up click sounds and lights start blinking…. the process of coming back online takes about 10 minutes….. okay some details of issues with this service:

Residential Gateway:

• The installation technician commented that these units are older but we install them and they will keep supporting them but in other areas they are installing newer equipment.
• The wireless capabilities, as one would expect with a two year old device, are not current. Yes I was spoiled with my N Draft router but the upside of my previous provider was they just brought the bandwidth to your door, if you wanted them to provide wireless that is an option. With this service you have to kluge your equipment, if possible, to act as a secondary Access Point.
• Every time a computer starts up and connects to the network, the TV breaks up briefly.
• Not Gateway specific but it is configured at the Residential Gateway; network firewall is mandatory, not an option!!!!! If you want to use your own firewall you can only turn it off for one device.
• The DHCP service just stops responding, this is not occasionally it is almost weekly.

TV

· The commercial claims you can record 4 programs simultaneously; check the extremely small print and you will see that does not apply if you are recording HD programs. If I have HD, why wouldn’t I be recording the HD format?

· Remote Control; it is the same you can buy at any big box store yet they advertise it as a benefit of their service. Comparing it to my previous provider’s product there is a serious omission. It may seem like a small issue but considering the number of channels (not to mention their menu allows you to add channels to it) having a “Favorites” button so you can easily get to the channels you frequently watch.

Voice

• Sound quality is awful.
• No Caller-ID on TV where I live.

Internet

• A few already covered above in the Gateway section.
• To access your account (e-mail, Voice Call History, etc…) you have to use Yahoo. Once again proof this is just DSL because it is all remnants of SBC/Yahoo.
• This is probably more gateway but… non-OS specific since I run XP, Vista and Linux; when the signal gets dropped, and then returns and despite the computer showing valid IP information they can not re-establish a connection to the internet until they are rebooted. Again not OS, because after rebooted the network configuration is still the same but internet is back online for that computer.
• Not just UVerse but a sore point…. They offer different levels of service which equates to higher bandwidth but the marketing really is deceiving. They make the “Download speeds” seem so appealing and a few years ago that was the key benchmark. However with digital media so convenient the Upload speeds are just as, if not more, important. I understand the technical limitations that keep providers from giving equal upload and download speeds but it is a marketing ploy.

I am sure I left a few off.