As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts I have been having problems with the speed of my broadband connection. This hasn’t been a sudden problem but rather a steady deterioration of the speeds I’ve been able to get. Under normal circumstances this wouldn’t have been too much of a problem, it’s not like I do a whole load of downloading apart from a couple of podcasts each week, but it has seriously impacted on my Warcraft game play. Trust me a 2 second delay is no fun on an instance run and means instant death in PvP.
The chaps at the online Virgin help desk have been anything but helpful and to be honest fairly patronising at times. The first chap told me that everything was fine at their end so the problem was probably with BT but as I was due a free upgrade to 8mb the reconfiguration of the line should sort out my problem. “Just give it a couple of weeks after the upgrade and you should notice the difference because you are so close to the exchange you’ll get the full 8mb. Oh, and the upgrade should be made within the next 7-10days”. So three weeks in which I will experience fluctuating connection speeds but with a super fast connectivity at the end of it all.
Of course it didn’t quite work out like that, despite the upgrade being made in the quoted timescale my connection speeds some 4 weeks later were averaging at about 0.8mb with lows of 0.2 and the occasional high of 1.6. So another visit to the Virgin help desk and after being ignored or disconnected by a couple of operatives I finally got through to someone. After explaining the history of my problem this new chap said the problem was neither with themselves or BT but rather much more likely to be the fault of my PC. Explaining that I had probably installed something which was using all of my bandwidth, such as my security software, he suggested I check the PC. He then proceeded into a jargon fest that left my limited PC knowledge stuck at the first sentence. When I asked him to put it in words of one syllable he obviously couldn’t be bothered and suggested that I get someone in who knew what they were doing to have a look at the PC. Jeez thanks a bundle.
Not knowing anyone locally who could help I sent out a distress call to my online chums who kindly responded by taking me through things stage by stage to check my PC out. The end result seems to be that there is nothing obvious on there that should cause me to slow down so dramatically and everything appears to be set up correctly. My final check is to take a laptop from work home and check to see if I have the same problems using that and hence confirm my PC is OK. I hope this gets sorted and I don’t have to resort to an ISP change, I’ve been with Virgin since getting an internet capable PC some 10+ years ago and feel something of a bond with them (i.e. I can’t be arsed to go around changing the email address for all my newsgroups etc.).
The chaps at the online Virgin help desk have been anything but helpful and to be honest fairly patronising at times. The first chap told me that everything was fine at their end so the problem was probably with BT but as I was due a free upgrade to 8mb the reconfiguration of the line should sort out my problem. “Just give it a couple of weeks after the upgrade and you should notice the difference because you are so close to the exchange you’ll get the full 8mb. Oh, and the upgrade should be made within the next 7-10days”. So three weeks in which I will experience fluctuating connection speeds but with a super fast connectivity at the end of it all.
Of course it didn’t quite work out like that, despite the upgrade being made in the quoted timescale my connection speeds some 4 weeks later were averaging at about 0.8mb with lows of 0.2 and the occasional high of 1.6. So another visit to the Virgin help desk and after being ignored or disconnected by a couple of operatives I finally got through to someone. After explaining the history of my problem this new chap said the problem was neither with themselves or BT but rather much more likely to be the fault of my PC. Explaining that I had probably installed something which was using all of my bandwidth, such as my security software, he suggested I check the PC. He then proceeded into a jargon fest that left my limited PC knowledge stuck at the first sentence. When I asked him to put it in words of one syllable he obviously couldn’t be bothered and suggested that I get someone in who knew what they were doing to have a look at the PC. Jeez thanks a bundle.
Not knowing anyone locally who could help I sent out a distress call to my online chums who kindly responded by taking me through things stage by stage to check my PC out. The end result seems to be that there is nothing obvious on there that should cause me to slow down so dramatically and everything appears to be set up correctly. My final check is to take a laptop from work home and check to see if I have the same problems using that and hence confirm my PC is OK. I hope this gets sorted and I don’t have to resort to an ISP change, I’ve been with Virgin since getting an internet capable PC some 10+ years ago and feel something of a bond with them (i.e. I can’t be arsed to go around changing the email address for all my newsgroups etc.).
