Lurch

When you say you use it to clean your paving a lot, how often is a lot, and how much paving is there? Do you intend using it for anything else? The cheap ones do the job, complete pot luck as to whether they last more than 12 Months.

The Android version is no better, and I remember having the same troubles with Mozilla for Windows Mobile some years ago. I'm sure it will get better, although I'm sceptical of most things so maybe not.

You shouldn;t need to use any CD's from Tiscali. Try right clicking on the network icon and seeing what the problem is. May just be disabled and need enabling.

Absolute nonsense. You can tax your car early so you can use your insurance before it runs out or you can do it online.

That was my first thought. I tend to swerve online shops that make delivery charges difficult to find as well or only calculate them at the end of the checkout process. If you subsidise your postage you can state a fixed P&P price and then alter the item price to make up any differences either way. It's what I tend to do when selling stuff through eBay, either make it up or put it as free postage, either way the buyer pays for it somewhere.

That's about as cheap as you'll get, well, you could probably find someone who'll do it for £199 if you look hard enough but I wouldn't one fitted on price only. I'd be looking at £5-600 minimum with service contracts etc... hence why I don't do domestic any more. Generally, you get what you pay for at the end of the day.

Tad excessive that, they're reasonably average all round.

Ask for a second opinion on anything condemned by the tester. IME most people wielding a PAT tester haven't a clue how to use it and either pass or fail things incorrectly, test things that don't need testing and then condemn them, or don't test half the stuff they're supposed to. Obviously they'll not be touching anything of yours so you may not want to get involved.

Autoleads, much easier.

You leave Barry Scot alone. He's not what he once was, I'll give you that.

I remember that, the name of it escapes me currently......

If you don't use it then there's no need to log in and check it. If you still have it registered with websites as your email address then I'll let you work out what's best to do.

HSBC aren't all that business orientated IME. Straight forward accounts they can do, anything slightly out of the ordinary and it all goes pear shaped. I had similar experiences with Lloyds, Barclays on the other hand are much easier to deal with and actually have people employed in branches to do more than just serve at the counter.

You can't really just work out an hourly rate for jobs that take 20 minutes. People seem to forget this, charge for 20 minute job multiplied by 3 isn't an hourly rate.

The people employed (or are self employed) as sparkies will have had many jobs where trying to save a couple of quid has turned out to be false economy. I have no problem with people doing DIY, but if you have to come on here first and ask random members of the public what the best thing to do is now you're confused about it then I would recommend you get someone in (preferably in advance of you dismantling the place). If you are competent enough to just swap the switches with no drama, and can do it correctly and safely, then crack on.

Any hire centre I guess for hiring, HSS, Speedy, Elliot etc...

Depends if you use 3G or not and if you find it any use. Simple really.

I still wouldn't shop at a DSG store though.

Not changing light switches, installing them maybe, but not swapping. As for "expensive", I resent that remark. Most people think anything over a fiver an hour is expensive. What you seem to have done there is assumed it's easy, then said you can't do it, so it is a skill and you have to pay for it. However, £100 is a bit steep for changing 2 light switches. You'll probably find it's cheaper to get someone booked in in advance rather than frantically rigning round after you've already knackered the wiring and created more work for someone to undo what you've done before simply swapping switches.

Give it 6 Months Blu-Ray players will be 30 quid in Aldi.

Odd, think that's an error with your PC rather than Open Office. Do you mean you save it fine as .doc but then when you try to open it again it opens it in garbled mode? As an aside, for the default 'Save As' option, head to Tools > Options and then go down to the Load\Save section and set the default save format for text, spreadsheet and presentations as Word\Excel\Powerpoint 97\2000\XP.

Music sharing on networks and the complexity of it confuses me. People seem to fanny about with Winamp remote plugins, iTunes limitations and wotnot. I just share my music folder across the network and play it all from any PC on the network with any media player that takes my fancy in any OS. Is that too simple?

Well, it works. I'm happy with it as a free service but I wouldn't neccesarily pay for it, if I was paying then I would go with someone else. The amount of users you have doesn't really matter, it's what they're all doing that counts. If most of them are just browsing and emailing with some light downloading then anything would suit really, if everyone is into downloading and gaming etc... for am majority of the time then I'd think about paying for a better service. Not sure what the contract terms are with the Orange plan, as it's free you could always sign up and try it for a Month or 2. I was hoping for some actual information from you. Orange are rather vague about limits and caps and their AUP is even vaguer.

What do Ornage do when you download heavily?

Open Office opens and saves files as Microsoft Office file formats. 90 odd percent of the time there's no difference, I have used OOo for the last 4 or 5 years and not had any issues, I use spreadsheets for invoicing and VAT returns with extensive formulas etc saved as .xls files and no-one has had any compatibility issues when opening them with MS Office. Try it, it's free.