The Great Broadband Speed Ripoff

We've been with or telephone and broadband provider for three years now, and we've been happy customers 99% of the time. We've only ever had a couple of phone outages and those were fixed within a few hours of happening.

However, recently we noticed that our broadband seemed to be slower than usual and when I did a speed test it showed we were only connecting a 1.6 Meg instead of the 12 Meg that we had been getting for the passed couple of years. We're paying for an up to 20 Meg connection so I had figured all this time that getting 12 Meg was pretty reasonable, considering our distance from the local exchange and the quality of the line.

So you can imagine my shock when I discovered we were only getting a 1.6 Meg connection. I called up our provider and they were surprised at how slow our connection was. We tried all sorts of fixes and tests; switching the router for the original modem, changing the phone cable, using the BT test socket; but nothing seemed to make any difference. We got sent a new filter for free and it arrived speedily on a Saturday morning. It didn't make any difference, at quiet times we were still only getting a 2 Meg connection.

Come the Monday I got a call back from our provider. The technician I was dealing with had tried various tests and tried to fix our line at 4 Meg but it kept connecting at 3 Meg. He informed me that he'd done a postcode check on our broadband and we could only get a 4 Meg connection. I didn't believe him and argued that we'd been getting 12 Meg for some time now. He went away to register a line fault with BT.

At this point I was beginning to think that the problem was indeed beyond our provider. I know that they can impose their own limits on connection speeds, especially on heavy users (which we aren't), however the technician seemed to have been genuine and was unable to raise our speed. So I suspected that in an attempt to increase the number of users on our local exchange, BT had capped broadband speeds in the area. Of course I had no proof of this, other than the fact that I had previously been getting a 12 Meg connection and now I could only apparently ever get a 4 Meg connection.

Anyway, the technician lived up to his promise and got back to me later in the day to confirm a visit from a BT engineer had been scheduled.

A few days later the engineer from BT turned up at our home. I was out at work but my wife was in. He was a bit off with her about having been called out, but checked out our master socket and broadband equipment (once again, as if it was our problem and not theirs). Unable to find a fault in our home he advised my wife that he would check at the exchange and get back to her.

Many hours later the engineer finally called my wife and told her that he had to stop fixing our problem because he was later for another appointment! Erm, isn't it his job to solve our problem or escalate us to a senior member of staff before just walking away! Funnily enough though, when I came home I checked our internet connection and we were suddenly connecting at 7 Meg! Whilst it's not our original 12 Meg connection, getting 7 Meg off of a 4 Meg line is certainly a worthy achievement.

So, still no proof, but how convenient that a BT engineer can go to the local exchange and suddenly increase a line speed that without a doubt could never achieve a higher speed than 4 Meg. :)

Change the size of Windows taskbar items

At some point in the past, when Windows 7 was in beta testing, I downloaded and installed a Windows 7 style pack for XP as Windows 7 beta wouldn't detect my wireless card so I couldn't use it. Whilst the theme itself was brilliant and perfectly emulated Windows 7, the resources it used left my system running to slow to be usable. So I uninstalled it all.

However one thing has remained from this legacy; the task bar items that appear when you have active windows were much smaller than normal. For a long time I had no idea how to fix this and wasn't really that bothered by it. Just recently though I decided that my laptop needed a visual overhaul so did some research to work out how to fix the taskbar.

Many thanks to ghacks.net for the solution to my problem. It turns out that you just have to modify one registry key in order to change the size of taskbar items. Go to the reg key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics and change the value for MinWidth. The default is 154 pixels. A higher value will stretch the taskbar items whilst a lower value will shrink them.