something about a $5 wrench?

A wizard did it.

Run it thru a VPN to see if it shows the same degradation. If it doesn't degrade, there's your answer. If it does degrade, it doesn't mean your equipment is bad, it just might mean they throttle all sustained transfers regardless of source or type.

My service is 60 megs and I get 64-65 but they don't specify an uplink speed. I get 4 consistently so I assume that's what I'm supposed to get. Oh, I just checked and they now specify 4 megs up. And no data caps . To me, that's far more important than the speed.

Not very useful. As someone else pointed out, this is an Android device which makes the SD card slot even less useful. If it was Windows, at least I'd have the option of installing apps to the card. But Android doesn't work like that. Even the apps that can be "moved" to the card rarely move all (or even a significant portion) of the app to the card.

Also, there are no 256 gig MicroSD cards. The largest currently available is 128 gigs with 200 gigs announced.

I stand slightly corrected but notice I ranted about android phones, too. The SD slot is worthless for apps in Android. You can't expand the filesystem onto it and "moving" apps to the SD card doesn't actually move the entire app. Move GTA to the SD card and see how much of the 1+ gig of data gets moved. A fraction of a fraction of a percent. I had to delete it from my Galaxy S5 because I needed the space to install the update to 5.0.

If you could expand the filesystem to include the SD card and present it to the OS as a single volume, then the SD card capacity would be relevant.

How on Earth is 16 gigs of internal storage going to be sufficient? My Stream 7 has 32 gigs and it's down to 12.8 gigs free with 5 or 6 apps installed and a recent disk cleanup (including system files). I'm no math whiz but 32-12.8 seems to be something like 19.1 gigs of storage used. The only way you could even hope of making 16 gigs of storage work would be to eliminate the recovery partition but, even then, you'll have no space to install software. Way to go, Dell. You've saved a couple bucks per unit by cutting storage to the bone and, in the process, made your product useless.

When are manufacturers of portable devices going to figure this shit out? Flagship android phones with 16 gigs of storage. Full windows tablets with 16 gigs of storage. Utterly useless. Stop it!

I don't know where you get "falling prices". My cell phone bill is currently 4 times what it was in the late 90s. I paid GTE $30/month back then. Of the Big 4, only AT&T currently has a plan of similar price and features. But it certainly isn't cheaper. Boost Mobile adds data for the same price but then you're on Sprint's network.

One step behind bleeding edge is the sweet spot for me. The last gaming rig I built is approaching 3 years and it's still going strong. The only bleeding edge part was the X79 Extreme 11 motherboard. I built it with one of the 750 gig Seagate hybrids which was later replaced with one of their 2tb hybrids. Works plenty fast for me. When I'm gaming, the next level generally finishes loading before the cut-scene is done so faster load times wouldn't make any difference.

Exept the part where he verified service with two broadband providers before buying the house. Both lied then claimed they'd made an error. Error or lie, he relied on their information to his detriment. There's even a phrase for that in the law. Detrimental reliance.

I just went throught this crap last year when I was shopping for a house. I had a wonderful region picked out but had to scrap it completely because nobody down there could tell me what internet service was available. "That's the first question people aske these days." "So what's available at this location?" "No idea." They seemed to think that satellite and 3 meg DSL were acceptable options. I started doing my own research and quickly learned that most providers lie, lie, lie. Frontier was the worst. Every address but one came back as "25mbit fiber". Even the place that was 10 miles down a dirt road. The only one I trusted was the cable company but their footprint was tiny. If I didn't buy a place in town, I was SOL.

I ended up looking closer to The Big City and only requested viewings of places where the cable company assured me they provided service. And the first thing I looked for was the cable company's box on the side of the house with a fat coax line coming out of the ground. If the place didn't have existing service, I didn't bother going inside. Except for that really creepy house that was more of a dare than a serious look. Who puts the kitchen in the basement???

But getting back to the point, good internet service is as important as a good water supply. Without it, the property is useless for most people. I'd even look at a place without electric service before I'd look at a place with no internet. I could set up a solar/diesel/battery system for power but I can't build my own high speed, low latency internet service.

They forfeit their contract for the area and can't submit a new bid for 10 years.

I can't be the only person who's sick and tired of celebrities pretending they know the first thing about science. Musicians should stick to playing music. Stop trying to save the world! Why does a band even have a "cancer arm"?

Clicking on one icon to switch to "metro" and then clicking on another to switch to "desktop" doesn't seem terribly cumbersome. On my tablet, search/replace click/tap.

My bean consumption is up 32% over last year.

Email was my favorite. Especially

Subject: Can't send email
Body: I've been trying to send an email all morning and it won't go through.

Clearly, the best way to notify me that email isn't working is to send me an email about it. Spoiler alert: Email was always working fine in these cases. It's almost like the domains .vom .cim and .con don't exist. If only there were some sort of error report given to the sender explaining that.