[CARPET KNIGHTS]

After much deliberating i decided to change my broadband to tiscali from aol. rang aol for my mac code when they said you must be careful with tiscali as even though they say they are unlimited they do run a fair usage policy. AOL reckon that i use in excess of 1000 hours a month? Not that many hours in a month! Anyway the say it equates to around 50 gig a month how the hell could i do that? Don't use it that intensely!

Have looked into it a little further and tiscali's unlimited package is limited to 30gig a month, should i be concerned or are AOL pulling a fast one?

Cheers Goron

[Dennis]

According to the Wanadoo calculator, to use 32.57 gigs a month you would need to (hold your breath)

surf 16 hours a day +
send 45 emails a day +
download 45 music tracks a day+
game online 16 hours a day+
watch 60 minutes of online video a day.

I do listen to online radio at 192 kbps and that racks up the usage.

I've been using DUMeter for a 30 day trial, it gives a good idea of usage.
http://www.dumeter.com/

[Geoff Jewkes]

Aol are a pain in the ass

[AJB]

The only problem with Tiscali is that they do not support
Migration, so once they have you , your stuck!!

The only way out is to cancel your service,
wait 2 weeks, and then approach another ISP

Have heard allsorts of horror stories where it's taken
weeks and weeks for Tiscali to remove the flag on the line
which must be done, BEFORE another provider can connect you.

Best case scenario is 2 weeks without broadband. worst case is total baldness
from ripping your hair out.
Having said that i've been with them on dial up and Broadband for about 8 years now though technically some of that was Lineone. And had no Problems at all

I also use the internet a lot as i have 5 networked computers in the house and kids don't half give it a thumping.

I've never yet got near half way on my monthly usage.

[Graeme@Access]

Hi Goron,

AOL are the spawn of the devil.  BT have uncapped all thier broadband services and now only give "recommendations" on how much you should use it.  I have never had a phonecall from them and have waxed 174 and 184Gb in the last 6 months (ul and dl).

If your are approaching 50Gb a month usage quota and not downloading stuff or using a lot of streaming services then i would look deeper into whats running on your PC.  I bumped into a bunch of computer geeks on IRC once and found out how easy it is to bot a PC running XP, esp if you dont plug the exploits with windows updates regularly.

Check the tasks that are running on your computer and type thier names into google.  eg. rundll32.exe throws up http://www.liutilities.com/products/wintaskspro/processlibrary/rundll32/ as the top hit.  It tells you what it does and turns out to be a kosher service.

My money is on you having an unusual one.. eg we had a bot'd PC at uni that was running smsss.exe (not smss.exe which is kosher).  It had 2.5 Gb of p0rn  buried in the windows directory and was sending it round the world on a 100Mbit connection.  All of this happened because one of my students thought they would install a "connection accelerator".

Hope this helps

Graeme
Access Cleaning Solutions