Bit OT broadband switch

In article , Big Les Wade scribeth thus

Cheap and quality do they ever go together;?..

You really shouldn't have to do this sort of thing. Why not dump them and go to a good ISP like Zen we had an outage here last week and their tech support was excellent:)

Why not simply reconfigure the sky router with the new details?

You can circumvent it by manually assigning IP details to the PC.

IIRC there is also a downloadable patch from MS to fix this issue - certainly for XP and so probably for vista.

Here you go:

Check you can get XP drivers for all their hardware first...

Any reason why you want to install XP rather than say 7?

That's what the Plusnet support guy suggested, but it turned out to be impossible for a man of my limited powers to reconfigure that router. The configuration screens didn't give you the option of changing the username and password. I assume they are written into the firmware or something by Be, who supplied it.

I don't know what that means, let alone how to do it.

Thanks. But I found that page when I was researching the problem. We tried the suggested remedy but it didn't work. Along with several other suggested solutions, that cumulatively took hours and hours and still didn't work. Then I gave up and used the old router.

Only that I have a lot of experience with XP and am impressed with its reliability. Also the fact that Vista was much worse than XP suggests that Vista's successor might be even worse still (as well as unfamiliar to me).

Windows 7 is what Vista *should* have been, in my experience. Stable and fast on the same hardware that Vista cripples, and it runs old programs better.

If you are familiar, then installing one of the shell emulators will get you back to the XP interface, if that's what you like. Or you can go back to an earlier version too, with the advantages of up to date security, programs and file handling.

Then they introduced Windows 8, which is reported to be truly 'orrible, but I've no personal experience.

Vista always got a very bad press because the early out of the box versions were decidedly flaky but it did settle down. Office 2007 by comparison picked up very little flack despite being riddled with instabilities, the user hostile ribbon interface and race conditions.

I think it grows on you - a bit like a fungus or marks on touch screens.

I guess it depends how heavily into GUI cubism you are. (I find it annoying to work with)

Vista DHCP is/was b0rked, but it's an easy fix.

It's been a few years since I've need to use that fix, but IIRC it doesn't take effect until after a reboot.

Once you've tried Win 7 you won't want to to back to Vista thats a cert and XP for that matter as good as that was. Win 8?, well it doesn't seem that popular at all, from those I know who have it!...

No, W7 is *streets* ahead of Vista.

It is at least as much better than Vista as XP was better than Millenium Edition.

For future reference, go to control panel, and then Network Connections. Right click on the ethernet adaptor (probably titles Local Area Connection) and select properties. Double click TCP/IP 4 protocol. In the dialogue displayed set the radio buttons to "Use the following IP address", and "Use the following DNS server addresses".

Enter an IP address outside the routers pool of automatically allocated DHCP addresses for the machine address, set the netmask to

There is an illustrated walkthough here:

It will be slightly unfamiliar, but you will get used to it in a day or so. Its far better than Vista... (not difficult) - and more reliable and secure than XP.

If you want to use SSDs effectively, then Win 7 or later is a must really since earlier versions don't support one of the key features that improves the SSDs performance (the so called "trim" command).

Is it? I prefer Vista to 7, myself.

Is it? I prefer Vista to 7, myself.

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I've got Win 7 on this machine and apart from the downgrade to LM from OE, I can't say that I've noticed any difference in functionality from my previous (working) OS (whatever that was) Though, I do set everything to "classic" view, (however you do that!)

But what is actually functionally different about it? (Other than things in the background that make it work a bit "faster"). Oh, the "start" menu defaults to "shut down" instead of "sleep", big deal :-)

tim

Pages like the following can be educational:

I have setup Winmail on Win7....and it works quite well.

From memory a lot of the people who complained loudly about it then went on to describe their systems, which did not comply with Microsoft's minimum requirements. I had no problem with it, and found it more stable than XP, which I had to reinstall every six months. I've had no difficulty with Win 7, Win 8 or 8.1, it took about five minutes to get the first two looking something close to what I had been used to. (No issues with Office 2007 either, and got more out it with the ribbon than I had done before.)

I think we concluded the other day that Vista was released much too early?..

The Vista abortion we had on a laptop bears no resemblance as to how well Win 7 ticks along...

Attribution corrected. For me, Vista provoked yet another look at Linux, due to its incompatibilities and interface changes. I ended up re-installing XP, which I have found very stable on all my machines for years now.

Diver and hardware faults excepted, pretty much any version of windows in the Win NT lineage from NT4 onwards is very stable.

Vista also got a bad press because it enforced various guidelines that Microsoft had laid down years before but had been ignored (at worst) or not fully complied with by software developers (myself included), for example not routinely allowing read/write access to Program Files. And of course what happened was that someone goes to run an app on a new Vista machine and they get error messages, it's Vista at fault not the program writer.