I received a love letter from Comcast when I arrived home yesterday…  Basically after being a loyal customer for over 6 years, Comcast has decided to cancel my $99/month cable/internet service. Their new and improved equivalent service will now be $140/month, or $130/month with their triple play phone/TV/internet offer.

So today I signed up for Verizon FIOS Triple Play service for $99/month with a discount to $70/month for the first 6 months. Unfortunately, with mandatory equipment rental my monthly bill will still be about $130/month, but I will save about $40/month on my landline phone service.  I’ve been on the fence about switching, but Comcast finally helped me to make a decision.

May the Comcast MBAs choke on the flood of customer service cancellations !

Adios Comcast…

I had a Windows XP MCE 2005 system at home as my DVR. Basically worked fine for many years although if you turned it off, it was unable to automatically reacquire the wireless connection via the Linksys PCI card. Service packs and driver updates never corrected the problem, so I resorted to leaving the system on all the time. I had won a free copy of Vista Ultimate at the Sarasota .NET Developers meeting a couple of months ago and decided to give it a try. I bought a new 1TB hard drive so that I could keep my XP MCE image intact in case I wanted or had to go back.

Well – it only took about 6 hours to install. Missing drivers for the Linksys wireless card, Microsoft Wireless keyboard and mouse, Hauppage dual TV tuner card, and although it’s a 3.2GHz system, with only 512MB of RAM it was paging like a mother calling her sons. It installed 86 updates – and that didn’t include Vista SP1. After the ordeal, it seemed to work although it was still thrashing.

Bought and installed 4G of RAM and it seemed a lot happier – Vista is a P.I.G. pig. Took a couple of days to tune the power and permission settings so that it worked like an appliance should – no keyboard / mouse interaction required to use it as a DVR.

Started seeing an interesting problem with the MCE remote though. After coming out of standby the remote behaved like keys were stuck – continuously scrolling the guide or screen icons after the first button was pushed. Hard resetting the Vista machine corrected the problem – now it’s no longer a DVR but yet another half-baked Microsoft computer.

Researching the problem on the Web it seems that this is a known problem – addressed in Vista SP1 – but not entirely. And there is a hotfix available, but it’s not clear whether or not this is required if you install SP1 – it reads like you still have to manually parse and edit the registry to add entries to force desired USB devices to be reset after coming out of standby.  So while I have now installed SP1 with no cure I still have this onerous task ahead. Meanwhile I have also discovered that re-plugging the MCE remote receiver corrects the problem. As the plug is accessible by reaching the back of the computer behind the entertainment center this is doable and I guess I will find out the life expectancy of the USB connectors.

Needless to say this has decreased the WAF significantly as she just wants to turn on the TV and PC and watch it – not mess with cables in order to do so.

Verizon FIOS with their DVR is looking better and better.

UPDATE:

Have installed all of the latest service packs and hotfixes. Performed the requisite registry edits. Still broken. The best workaround that I've found is to install a powered USB hub between the Microsoft remote and the Media Center PC. The hub's power is provided by a wall wart connected to the computer's UPS. This has reduced the number of failures to about twice a week.

Having downloaded and installed Windows 7 Beta back in January, I was eager to try the new Release Candidate 1. What a long strange trip it’s been…

Evidently the only way to legitimately download the RC is by using the Akamai Download Manager provided by clicking on the Download button. All well and fine – but on my Intel 975XBX Quad Core machine running XP SP3 with IE8, the download manager never runs and crashes the browser.

Tried clearing the browser cache, disabling pop-ups, removing the Google toolbar, clearing the Java cache, etc.  Nothing worked.  E-mails to Akamai went unanswered. Searches on Google revealed that I’m not the only one experiencing this problem.

Finally found the workaround – went to my trusty Win2K server sitting in the corner, started up IE6 and went through the same download registration sequence and then clicked the download button. Voila – the Download Manager worked, the download started and is progressing as I write this.

I guess I’ll have to keep this older technology around for when the new magic breaks…

First it was Comcast vs Verizon - where Comcast blocked e-mails sent from Verizon. Now it appears that the next battle is Comcast vs Netflix.

Recently I stopped receiving e-mails from Netflix on my Comcast e-mail account. A trip to the Netflix website revealed that they had determined that my Comcast e-mail account is no longer valid - funny, I use this account daily for all kinds of e-mail - including notifications about other subscriptions. Re-entering the e-mail address into Netflix clears the error until they attempt to send me another notice - then the error appears again.

Conclusion: Comcast must be actively blocking e-mails from Netflix to their Internet customers - can't have Comcast subscribers ditching their Pay Per View services can they...

Maybe it's time to change to Verizon's FIOS service for TV and Internet - Comcast is really telling me how much they value my business with this blockade.

UPDATE: After getting ahold of someone at Comcast, it appears that the Netflix mail server may be blocked by it's IP address. They requested that I provide them with the IP address of the Netflix server.  Unfortunately, nobody at Netflix that I can get ahold of can (or should) provide me with this information. Netflix did indicate that they are aware of the problem and are working it on their end.

UPDATE: The blockade continues. It's now been in place for almost a month...

UPDATE: The blockade has now been extended to e-mails from The GM Card as well...

Gotta love this:

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/25/microsoft_wga_server.html

Microsoft WGA servers down; XP and Vista installs marked as counterfeit