JamesThorburn

When you find a 1.5l bottle of Fanta you should not place it on your desk, twist the cap, and then turn around.

It only sprayed out bubbly goodness for around half a second before I twigged what was happening, but that was just enough time to leave a fine, sticky coating of orange soda on my desk, my keyboard, my mouse, my wallet, my phone, a pen, and me.

Excellent.

After a little searching I’ve managed to get myself a job sorted which’ll help get some money back into the coffers.

Things have been getting a little boring lately, after over a month off work its easy to run out of things to do to pass the time, so I’ve decided to have a bit of a play with my processor collection.

Anyone whos dabbled with overclocking must surely know the name abit, and after a little hunting I was able to find one of these…

The Abit TH7II-RAID was both an overclockers dream and their worst nightmare, with Abit’s excellent SoftMenu III BIOS overclocking tools and a little siren that would go off when you pushed things a little too far…. Or not far enough…. Or on a Thursday.Unfortunately I won’t be able to have a play with this straight away as while I have some Socket 478 processors here, and my new PSU arrives tomorrow (HEXUS have taken back all their equipment now), my old RIMM memory modules are still at my parents house. When I next head back I’ll also be sure to pick up my Abit BP6 – complete with a pair of Celeron’s – and a couple other boards I have back home.

I also should have an Abit BX133-RAID arriving tomorrow, along with some PC133 memory, which should allow me to bring up my Pentium III test system once I have found a PCI or AGP graphics card and an IDE hard drive.

This means I should be able to start populating my CPU Archive with further information such as CPU-Z screenshots, speaking of which I will be adding to this section of the site again soon.

If you are looking for a fine provider of ADSL you could do worse than looking at Virgin Media. You could, for example, take all your money and set fire to it, as a sacrifice to the gods of Internet – this will not give you an Internet connection. Virgin Media is a pretty close second however.

Since moving back to Swindon in July I’ve seen my XBox Live Gold account (£40) completely wasted, played the superb Team Fortress 2 for a total of around 3 hours, and given up using Skype at all (which used to save me a tidy amount on phone calls). My housemate, Colin, has stopped playing Counter Strike: Source, despite being insanely good at it.

The reason? Latency.

Unless we want to play games in the narrow window between around 3am and 7am where our connection is actually usable then the Virgin ADSL network appears to be overloaded to breaking point.

Download speeds at 9:33am are a pitiful 1023Kb/sec. This is an ‘upto’ 8Mbit/sec connection. Our actual line only syncs at around 4.3Mbit/sec, which isn’t Virgins fault, and running tests at 6:30am sees Speedtest.net returning results at almost full speed. When everyone wakes up things fall apart however.

Now personally this isn’t a deal breaker, ok slow download speeds are frustrating but 1Mbps is just about acceptable, but the lag is simply appalling. Try playing a first person shooter with a ping of 200ms is absolutely pointless. This isn’t even as bad as the connection gets, at times we’ve seen reports of over 500ms.

Just for comparative purposes I got a friend in Scotland to run a test to the same server a few minutes later.

Download and upload speeds are way up (granted his line syncs at higher speeds than ours) and despite being around six times further away from the test server pings are a whole 200ms longer.

Just to put things into perspective, a good 56Kb modem and ISP can give pings around 120-150ms, and the ISDN line my parents had 10 years ago could offer sub-50ms times.

To make matters worse, Virgin refuse to accept high latencies as a fault, at all. Nor will they accept packet loss (100% packet loss to www.virgin.net over a ten minute time period at one point, while the site worked fine for other users). According to their technical support so long as BTs test site returns results of over 400Kb/sec they are not under any obligation to investigate the issue.

So far I’ve spent around £25 on calls to technical support without Virgin even accepting there is a fault. Some of the phone operators have tried their best to be helpful but others have been outright rude.

In total I’ve wasted the following due to having Virgin Media ADSL as my service provider.
XBox Live Gold - £40
Team Fortress 2 – £10 (one third of the Orange Box)
World of Warcraft 3 month subscription – £25
Phone calls to Virgin – £25

Add in the cost of the service (£20 a month for the ADSL, £10 a month for the phone line) and in one year I’m going to have spent £360 on a service which is bordering on unusable, along with a further £100 on tech support and game subscriptions.

Given Virgin spends millions on advertising I’d like to suggest they perhaps cut back a little on this and instead invest in some back-end infrastructure worth a damn, because right now they are quite possibly the UKs worst ISP.