At last! A large package from CCL delivery arrived on my doorstep arrived on my doorstep today.
And thank god… rejoice… the heavens have opened, its here! The brand new drive is here, and it works!
And it’s not bad at all. It works at about 2mbps file upload and download so its not so bad. Its not Gigabit ethernet but still its relatively good.
I can stop complaining about it now!
I have been on broadband for years now and never regretted the change over.
If you are one of those people who feel broadband still isn’t really for you, here are a few pointers in the direction of upgrading.
You should change to broadband if…
After my complaints to Freecom regarding their poorly manufactured Network Drive they finally got back to me today to tell me that they would be sending me a brand new drive – thank god.
They will send me a postage label which I can attach to the box and return to them, and then they will send me a new one.
To be fair their customer service lines were pretty good and the corresponding emails were quick and easy to understand so +1 on that note.
It’s just sad that I was the one who got the bad drive.
Ah well, I’ll update again when the new drive arrives.
Every time I boot up my laptop TV tuner or go to iPlayer or the likes, it always makes me think. Is TV on your PC taking over normal TV?
I think it is. With a computer, you can now basically watch a programme whenever you want to. BBC’s iPlayer gives you 7 days to watch a program, the same goes for many others, and Five provides TV shows for several months now.
Watching live TV on your PC is also very cheap now. You can get a Freeview USB dongle for a laptop or PC now for around £20 and TV cards don’t cost a bomb either. Windows Media Center is perfect for watching TV on your PC and comes free with Vista Home Premium and Ultimate. You can even use your computer as a PVR thanks to programs such as Windows Media Center, whereas a set top PVR for your TV is costing you sometimes a couple of hundred pounds.
It seems so much better value to use a computer for your TV nowadays.
Do you think TV on your PC is overtaking conventional television?
Well, I recently purchased a Freecom Network Drive from Freecom themselves and so far I’m having no end of problems.
When it got here, looked fine – no damage physically or anything noticable. Opened the box, checked all the components had come in one piece, and hooked it up to my router. Then went to the computer, checked the network had recognised it and it had. Click its logo and hang on… very slow…
So I tried going to the config page and seeing if I needed to set anything up. Still very slow but I got in – hard drive recognised, all seemed to be OK.
Several hours later I still couldn’t work it out. It was taking 30 seconds or so to load a page and adding a new folder resulted in an error and the a crash. I didn’t even bother trying to put a file on it.
As a last resort, I did a hard reset and tried again, and now its not even detecting a hard drive.
I will be sending back to Freecom and if they wont fix it I’ll be requesting my money back and I will look elsewhere. It seemed like a really good deal because I’d heard how good the Network Drive Pro’s were and the prive for a standard 500gb drive seemed almost too good to be true compared to many other companies.
So, if you want my advise, if you need a simple network drive for your home, don’t look at Freecom.
There are updates to this post at:
(21st Oct 08) http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/10/21/update-on-the-faulty-freecom-drive/
(4th Dec 08) http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/12/04/update-on-the-freecom-network-drive/
(13th Dec 08) http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/12/13/the-working-freecom-network-drive-review/