Another VOIP Moment

Today I was reviewing some accounting information when I discovered Vonage had not only charged me for an unreturned box, but also another $40.00 fee for some inexplicable reason. I called the company, tired of waiting for the BBB to intervene, and they had no information on me. Finally, just to get the ball rolling, I logged into my online account where I discovered that Vonage had replaced my account information with a man named Max. Mind you, I was still able to get into this account and access it, but Max now seemed to have taken my place. As a result, it took ten minutes just for the Vonage employee to explain that the charge was for the unreturned box. The grand total for this service is now up to $87.24.

The reason I haven't returned the box is simple: the BBB is supposed to be fielding the entire situation. I know those fellas are busy, but the only advocacy I've received is a ridiculous letter from Vonage through the BBB explaining that they don't have to pay me back until I give them their unit. There was no mention of the deception there employee used to get me hooked or the charges I would incur just to ship the trial unit back (which I still never got to use because of their misinformation). It's hard to get pushy about a group like the BBB who have to filter through endless complaints about problems such as mine, but this little issue started two months ago. I'm just about ready to ship the thing back and be done with it.

Beginner: Vonage: Very Obnoxious Insulting and Problematic (VoIP)

The hilarity of my very clever acronym attack regarding my latest tech adventure may not make sense unless you yourself have attempted to use a VoIP service. VoIP stands for Voice Over IP which is a fancy way of saying phone on your internet. Normally you'll have two separate services for phone and internet. They may come in on the same line (like a DSL or dial-up scenerio) but they are separate functions entirely. In the case of VoIP, you're actually speaking over the internet instead of over a phone wire, at least from your end of the call. There are dozens of ways to accomplish this but companies like Vonage have made special little boxes that actually turn your home phone into an internet phone. The end result, ideally, will be clear phone calls and FREE LONG DISTANCE. For that matter, it's usually far cheaper (upwards of half the cost) of regular phone lines. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything...everything could go wrong.
For starters, many customers claim that when transferring a number from their carrier to Vonage, Vonage drops the ball and loses their home or business number. For a relatively new number this could be an inconvinience but for someone who's had the same number for thirty years, this comes as a tad more than problematic.

That aside, my personal experience with Vonage was ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE!!! I can't stress this enough: Do not switch to Vonage unless you enjoy hours on the phone with people who cannot understand you (and vice versa) and who cannot fix your ever-growing issues.

So what happened to me? Well, to give you some sense of my experience, I've filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. This would be my first time doing so and anyone who has read my blogs knows that I've had my fair share of frustrations with tech companies. Something about Vonage, however, was all the more sneaky and underhanded.

The long story short is that I was told repeatedly that I would have a seamless transition and after investigating my situation, it would have cost me over $100 just to ensure I wouldn't be without phone or internet for 24 hours. Vonage didn't bother to share that I would have to call my ISP and explain the need to switch from regular DSL to stand-alone DSL. In fact, if Vonage hadn't screwed up and neglected to tell me that they couldn't use a P.O. Box (which is what my current ISP was using for me) I would have never even found out. One day my net would have just shut off.

As for now, I haven't sent back my equipment, I have contacted the Better Business Bureau and they are contacting Vonage. I have been charged $40.00 for equipment I couldn't use. I have done this because Vonage, after sending me tools I couldn't use because of their incompetency, wanted me to pay to ship back the equipment. This would have been mostly accecptable if I had actually gotten to use the trial they offered but I'll never actually know if Vonage even works. Arg!

More on this as my situation progresses.

Here We Go: Month of Alternative Internet Communication

The month of September is often a transitional month for the seasons so what better time to begin our new blog format. This month I will be discussing different forms of on-line communication with emphasis on VoIP. As will be the case henceforth, I will start each month with a general post on the current topic and then blog about different aspects of that topic. I will still blog on major tech events but most postings will be thematic. So, what do I mean by alternative internet communication?

For some of us, communicating via the net is old hat. Some of us talk over instant messaging programs and email more often that we talk on the phone. But email and IM clients are old news. The net has a whole new set of services to share including: VoIP (voice over IP), video conferencing, blogging, and mini-blogging. All of these have a large variety of iterations and each has great benefits and huge flaws.

Tomorrow, be on the lookout for my initial reaction to Vontage, a major VoIP provider. It isn't pretty.

The New and Improved

The Missoula Solutions Blog will be receiving a total makeover over the course of the next month. While I will continue to report on relevant tech news stories, I will be focusing more heavily on a weekly topic for beginning and intermediate computer users. Each post will be dubbed as Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced to indicate whether or not you might be interested in the post and the degree of computer skill it will require. Eventually I hope to include a short podcast in addition to the blog. Over the course of the next week I will make this transition to make Missoula Solutions a more usable and relevant blog.

Thank you for your patience as we update and change the blog.

iPhone Released: You Shouldn't Care!

I must confess that the iPhone does look pretty neat and in about six months I imagine it will be one of the most interesting technological devices available...or maybe not. But if you live in Montana I wouldn't get too excited. There are two kinds of cell phone networks: CDMA and GSM. Montana is well covered by CDMA. Guess which kind the iPhone uses?

So we won't be seeing Steve's new beauty up here for a while and quite honestly, GSM isn't nearly as good as CDMA so I haven't a clue as to why the iPhone premiered on a GSM network but worry not. Rumors abound that Apple will share its groovy new phone with other cell carriers soon enough. For now, I wouldn't bother caring too much. For gosh sakes...it's just a phone and a nano slapped together.

Grumble...

Girls Texting: A Rant

So this is less of an information post and more of a speculative one. Given the drastic move away from the "culture of the table" (someone smarter than me first used that phrase) I'm consistently frightened by the parental allowances made to young men and women. By culture of the table I mean the world where families sit down with one another and speak over a meal. Many social, psychological, and philosophical scholars have noted the sudden decrease in this culture given the upswing of dining out or, more importantly, dining in front of a television. My experience today only served to reinforce what I already believe to be true. There, in the middle of a grocery store, were at least three girls walking along with their mother or grandmother with a phone in front of them texting as they walked.

I don't think texting is all that terrible. I do it on occasion when I don't feel a whole conversation is necessary or when I need to send or receive information without disturbing my environment with a phone call. Let's face it: cell phone usage is obnoxious and alienating. It creates a virtual bubble of communication from which other people in your proximity are excluded. There isn't anything great about that. Now, I certainly don't think banning cell phones is the answer but I'd at least like to see moments where families unplug and talk to each other. When I was a kid (and I'm not all that old!) a walk through the grocery store with my mom gave me an opportunity to talk to her and tell her what was going on in my life. It was a way that I was able to build a relationship. Perhaps not every child is suited to make the same kinds of connections but so long as they're chatting with their friends , they certainly aren't talking to anyone else around them.

I've unfairly sorted out teenagers; all family members are just as guilty. There are of course, families that don't face this issue but I think it's safe to say (having done no actual research) that most American families function in this manner. Our time is spent together in front of televisions or on the internet.

My advice: DON'T give your kid a cell phone until they're driving. Does that sound outrageous to you? It wasn't ten years ago when cell phones were prohibitively expensive and most of us lived without. I understand that technology can take some of the parental pressures off but we're creating a generation of techno-zombies by never unplugging our kids. I'm just as guilty. I can't even sit quietly without some device to entertain me and that just isn't as things should be. I feel as though we're fighting an uphill battle yet something has to give or we'll become the very technology we employ.

End of rant...

Registry Cleaning and Vista

I've been a Registry Cleaning fence-sitter for a few years now. I've never personally experienced a "wow" after cleaning a registry except, perhaps, for the sheer number of bad registry entries some cleaners claim to find. Truly, Windows errs on the side of caution and often leaves behind a tremendous number of items your system doesn't need. The registry, for those of you who haven't been informed, is kind of like a giant index where Windows keeps track of where files, programs, and system information has gone and what it is doing. Often "hacking" Windows entails altering some small registry setting to do things like automatically log in, or change the number of recent files listed in a program. Even if you don't bother tweaking your Windows, the registry is a very important method by which Windows keeps track of all things on your machine. So, it may not surprise you to learn that altering the registry in a way that wasn't intended can have some very serious results. Registry cleaners, simply put, are programs that go through your registry, compare it to what you actually have on your computer, and remove anything that seems old, obsolete, or unnecessary. One of the most popular cleaners is called Ccleaner.

Please understand that I'm a huge Ccleaner advocate. It slices, dices, and trains your dog. Seriously, this program does a great deal for being free. However, I have found that almost all of these programs excel in XP meanwhile rendering catastrophes in Vista. I don't know if Ccleaner simply isn't Vista-ready yet or if I had some particularly strange setting that caused it to clash with its registry cleaning function, but after using Ccleaner in Vista, things started to go horribly wrong.

For now, I would strongly recommend NOT using any third party programs that erase or quarantine files in Vista unless you are highly confident that the program is friendly with Vista. Otherwise, you'll find yourself reinstalling THE ENTIRE OPERATING SYSTEM when your original effort was computer maintenance.