Cheap Dial-up ISP on TalkTalk?

discontinued the Onetel 1p/min dial-up service they took

All billing *and* line rental goes to them.

Tiscali idiot.

discontinued the Onetel 1p/min dial-up service they took

system. All billing *and* line rental goes to them.

Thanks, I now need a new chair and this here wall repainting...

Meanwhile, at the uk.telecom Job Justification Hearings, Andy Cap chose the tried and tested strategy of:

They hacked off the keyboard, put a touchscreen on it and it's now known as an 'iPad'.

I fully support the idea of Teamviewer, I've used it a few times to both receive and provde support and it works very well, and seems quite secure with a one time passcode that it's "client" end generates automatically and has to be given (by telephone or email or instant messenger) to the "master" person. Plus it doesn't have to be installed, just download the .exe and run it, so when not in use it doesn't consume any PC resources and can't be accessed externally.

While using it either person can open a notepad window and use it to type messages to the other just like an instant messenger application.

The "client" end also retains full use of the mouse and keyboard, so can try things out while the "master" end is observing and perhaps guiding.

Yup, Teamviewer does work well, but then I fall into another trap of being called by lazy persons to remotely do their PC work :-(

I don't mean PC maintenance, I mean, "oh, can you sort through and paste these photos from my holiday cruise in this web thingy so I can get a printed book done to show my friends", "can you visit the website order this video tape from Amazon for me? Someone told me it's available there" ... etc...

However my main showstopper with 'Teamviewer' was trying to get the user to open up their web browser ("oh, what's that?"), type the

So, I then get calls to come around to their house and sort the PC out Relatives, friends, well people who should know better. :-(

About a year ago I persuaded a rather well off couple to ditch their expensive PC which was always giving problems (user errors most of the time) and buy a couple of swanky Apple machines. Haven't heard back any problems, so that's a result there.

And my latest tack, especially with folks that have unwittedly ended up with the broadband, is to say.... go buy an Apple iPad, after all you want to be a consumer of the internet - not a document creator or an office chair. Then they balk at the price of this "toy", and leave silently.

But this 85 year old won't learn those new tricks.

Kind of wondering if I should just go ahead and connect her Win95 machine to broadband, shut down absolutely everything in the router except POP3 mail access, and route that securely to a forwarding mail server (that I'd have to run, I suppose) that could collect the outgoing mail and then somehow ask her (how?) which one did she really intend sending. That way email worms wouldn't be able find their way out.

Just do it and install a free account from LogMeIn which does work very well and you can do all the remote assistance needed all she has to do is just -start- the machine!..

Mind you I've never used it with WIN 95 don't think it was around then. Why not upgrade her to at least WIN 200 Pro?, a stable system that does work well, is easy to use, she might just thank you for it even.

Why not give her access to the net via Firefox thats easy to use and stable, just all point and click. She might feel empowered with all this new access she has;!..

A sub to UK D-I-Y even;!

After all your never too old to learn;))...

Try..

Or..

Dan

Trouble is I'm unwilling to spend the rest of my life on remote assistance fixing up bugs and other problems on a dead OS.

Do you remember as a youngster memorising the positions of a car's gear stick? First straight ahead, second down, third up to the right...

Well, that's how she interacts with GUI screens. The route to the parts where she should click is micro-memorised, i.e move mouse down and 1 inch to the left, click, further right to the last image, click, rather than folowing what is actually written on the buttons, and visual clues what should be done next. There is no sense of following context, and anything different in layout absolutely throws her (and other folks I've come across).

These folks don't use the internet browser. It's random and requires amounts inquisitiveness and intuition that only the young seem to work right. The mere significance of a mouse pointer changing to a hand when doing a 'move over' on a link completely passes them by as the mouse is never swept over the screen to look.

Their comfort domain is outlook express, and things in there are mostly always there in the same place.

The computer has been put there by hopeful sons and daughters (usefully based overseas) in the hope that their parent might have a skype conversation with them or join them on Facebook. Unfortunately all those GUI interfaces have the whoosh element about it....

Not true. Some are.

Thanks, but these services are for lines provided and billed on BT.

Seems she is stymied On TalkTalk

_but excludes calls to Channel Island, dial-up

minutes per call but if you would like to keep

Nice to see that Fast4 still has FRIACO offerings. I used them before I got ADSL, seems a long time ago.

In message , tony sayer writes

Glad you said that

You can go round and teach my mother ...

Win95 virtualises really easily, and is designed to run on hardware that is far slower than current so even simple virtualisation isn't a slowdown. So she could have exactly the same GUI running exactly the same apps, but on top of a modern OS. The modern OS is exposed to the internet, but the VM has only limited access (either by firewall, or because the VM itself does NAT).

Pick a host OS - I'd use Linux, but could be anything, probably best to be the stablest, most long supported you can find. Set it to automatically download updates. Then image the Win95 disc, and have it run the virtualiser fullscreen on boot (make it boot without a login prompt). I've used QEmu for Win95, it's dead simple, you just image the hard drive and then do:

qemu -hdc harddrive.img

and that's it. This is easily wrapped in a script to run on boot. Win95 doesn't do all the Genuine Windows stuff that newer versions do, so it doesn't mind if you boot it on completely different 'hardware' each time. If you want to get complicated you can also share files with the host machine via emulated Samba. Then feel free to lock down the host OS as much as you like. You can put all the remote control stuff (eg SSH) on the host OS and still be able to maintain the VM through that if you need to.

Theo

Whilst all the above is largely true, one has to ask what is the point of running wn95 at all, since a native linux setup can be made to do all the same s*it anyway and better, and can be configured to be so bloody simple that its actually easier to drive than windows.

Only if some legacy WinApp needs to be run is there essentially an issue..and if it runs on win95, chances are that it can run under WINE.

Thanks. Nice idea, and very do'able. This might be the way out if I also can stop viruses invading or leaving her VM. However, for that I could install a virus scanner and a proxy mail server inside linux and have that quarantine mail attachments before they reach her mail box.

Whoa! Too many projects and I'm fast running out time on the bank holiday! :-(

Yeah, I know. :-(

It's the user that's not compatible. If a button or feature is somewhere else, she'll never find it and then remember it has changed.

Outlook Express is apparently not very stable under wine, and it's not something that looks like getting fixed :-(

I think the sandboxed virtualisation route is the one to go for, rather than wine.

I use VNC-SC - i.e. the single click version. Single exe, about 200K, can be downloaded or emailed etc. When run it presents whatever support options you have configured. Because the client it using an app to "phone home" to support, there is no need to mess about with firewalls etc. You can also pre-install it on a PC and then have the user run it on demand if they need it.

Oh yuk I wouldn't let one of them to connect a window box to the 'net, asking for trouble.

That's exactly what the Teamviewer "QuickSupport" module does but you don't have to configure anything.

Sorry to reply to my own post but should also have said that, for me and the family computers that I support at least, Teamviewer is much quicker to render the video of the remote screen than VNC, UltraVNC or VNC-SC ever were. Using the VNC family, it could take up to 20 seconds, maybe even longer, for changes to be seen on my screen but with Teamviewer, it's not quite instant but it's not far off. Try it out. I guarantee you'll see a big improvement over VNC stuff.