This is exactly why I always dial all 10-digits of the phone number of people I know. Too many people I know lose their phone and have no clue how to get ahold of anyone. I just don't get it. (I also know most of my credit card numbers, all my bank account numbers, my home address, the alphabet, even backwards, I must be a gotdamn genuis I tell ya) Kids today (waving fists) just are getting stupider and stupider. Of course I can also manage to leave my phone in the car when I run an errand inside the bank, the store, or food pickup. Well, not to mention the fact that even at 250lbs I'm not so lazy that I don't actually park my car and get out and walk into places instead of using the drive-up. And no, not in the fire lane, in an actual parking spot. Now if we could just rid the world of soccer mom's SUVs so I could actually get my car doors open in the parking lot we'd really be accomplishing something.

Why does this surprise anyone? They randomly blocked our mail server from sending SMS messages, even though we are on no blacklists, have SPF & SNDS setup, etc. It's impossible to get through to them (anyone have a good email/phone contact) and we finally got someone at Verizon Wireless to fight through the red-tape and get us restored, even though they swear they didn't change anything it started working after days of complaining, and dozens of angry firefighters calling them (we do text messaging for multiple fire departments) They've done this many times to our email server as well. I still love how Verizon/Comcast block Port 25 thinking that moving to a new port will do anything to truely stop spam.

I don't understand your non-poweruser who would sign a wireless contract. Prepay is by far more cost effective, $1 a day to talk unlmited to any Verizon customer (and who isn't, even if they are evil), otherwise 10c per minute outbound, add $10 and you get unlimited text, otherwise 10c a text. Best of all, no taxes or bogus FCC fees, etc. Now if you live in NYC this might not work, as you probably have people on all the networks, so you'd be paying 10c per minute to talk outbound during the day (unlimited nights and free inbound) But here in Delaware/Maryland area, AT&T's network quality is horrible, and Sprint/Nextel is nearly non-existant.

In case you're curious, we have 1 full time person who works in a seperate room for the dusting, inpection, memory & hard drive testing. We have a bench spot with a air hose/central vacuum, along with a power cord for power supply testing. We then have 8 other spots for him to run memory/hard drive tests. Normally all of these spots are full. They then move to the next step. We have 1 full time tech that works on exclusively notebooks/lcd/tv hardware issues, he has a main desoldering/soldering station for dc jacks, cap replacements, and notebook motherboard replacements. He then has 4 additional bench spots for notebook testing. He also does most of the notebook bad to new hard drive cloning, and some of the Windows rebuilds on those. He will also test customer returned parts such as hard drive or memory in one of his 3 desktop testing machines. We then have 1 full time tech who builds/tests new desktop computers, data backup/recovery procedures, and desktop virus cleanup. We have another full time tech who does desktop/notebook virus cleanup, along with placing orders with vendors and receiving in shipments, and rma processing. Both of these techs work on about 5 machines simulatenously. We also have our full time bookkeeper work on about 2 to 3 notebook virus cleanups at a time while filing, answering the phones, etc. We have 1 full time sales manager, and one part time repair order taker. They usually test customer returned lcds, video cards, external/flash hard drives, printers, etc They also test every new notebook, and complete the Out of Box Experience on all new notebooks we sell, along with av software instalation and data transfer from old notebooks to new. We will not sell a new notebook without testing the ram and hard drives first, and doing a cleanup/OBE finalization. Most machines have a bench time of about 6 to 8 hours, we bill only for "interactive time", time which we are physically working on the machine or operating the mouse/keyboard. Typically we bill for about 45min to 90min of time. Labor is billed at $1.90 per minute. Usually, we take in about 20-30 machines a day. Typical turn around time is between 3 to 10 business days, depending on volume.

We have repaired about in excess of 50,000 machines, and I'll tell you the tools needed are very simple. The process we do is, open the machine, dust with air compressor (with humidity drier, you can pickup at sears a 4gal with drier for about $99, saves alot of money on $3-6 cans of air) and central vacuum system (a shopvac will work), then inspect the motherboard & video card for blown caps. Take off the cpu fan and inspect the compound, if it is home built, lord only knows what you'll find. Test the power supply with a digital power supply tester (one of the $12 lcd ones) if good, still open the power supply, look for blown caps. (many will have blown caps, and be causing sporadic problems the simplistic tester will not). See if machine will power on / boot. If it doesn't power on, or hangs on post, remove modem and nic if it's a seperate card, when these are blown by lightning will cause no post. Ensure the hard drive is mounted properly with 4 screws installed, less than that the vibrations will cause the drive to go bad. (don't care what operating specifications you show me, or what G-rating the drive has, this is the case) Then test memory with Memtest86+ 1.70, and the hard drive with one of the 3 versions of Seatools by seagate. (some versions will lock on some video/chipsets, if you get a long string of bad sectors on a hdd bigger than 320gb, that begin about 2/3rds way through drive, test with a different version to be sure, as there is a sector count issue with some large hds) The 3 versions are an older GUI one, the newest GUI one, and the text version. If you have even 1 bad sector - replace the drive. We do the above process on EVERY machine before we attempt to do anything else, it is well worth the couple hours it takes to do. If you make it this far, than 99% of the time, you're problem is malware/viruses. Run Combofix, look for files not removed by it, boot with Ultimate Boot CD (the WinPE based one) or something like Knoppix and manually remove them. Search the WIndows, Windows/System32, Windows/System32/Drivers directories for files created in the past month, anything suspcious is probably a malware. Rename those files. Look under Program Files, Program Files/Common, ProgramData, and Users/UserName/ApplicationData for suspicious directories and rename/delete, these are where your AlphaAntivirus, Windows Police Pro, UltimateAV, etc, like to hide. Boot back into windows, run Hi-Jack This!, remove any suspicious entries, reboot, anything left? If so, remove manually with bootcd. In add/remove programs, remove all unneccessary programs. Then run CWShredder, Malwarebytes Antimalware, Spybot, and AVG Antivirus. (Feel free to substitute legimate antimalware/antivirus tools in place of these 3, but we find these 3 work best for us. Install all Windows updates, update all sytem drivers, try browsing the internet for 2 or 3 minutes. If all seems ok, reboot one last time, and be sure you can browse the inet still. All done! This fixes pretty much everything. Other than specific issue your customer may have complained about. Also, be sure to check the amount of ram here are what we recommend, otherwise, with latest service packs, etc. machine will seem sluggish. Windows 95 - 96mb+, Windows 98/ME - 196mb+, Windows 2000 384mb+, Windows XP 640mb+, Windows Vista Home Basic 1Gb+, Windows Home Premium 2Gb+, Windows Vista Ultimate/Windows 7 4Gb+ If you don't give machine back with this amount of ram, your customer will swear machine is slower than when the brought to you, doesn't matter how untrue it is, doesn't matter how much malware you removed or how machine didn't even go into windows! CPUs/Video Card rarely go bad unless abused. Normally, your find a under-rated power supply, or defective power supply to blame. Also, if you're working with a notebook, be sure to dust the exhaust/intake vents, if still power down/lockups, you need to disassemble and recompound cpu/video chipset with Arctic Silver 5. The other thing is power problems, mouse lockups, etc many times are caused by bad batteries, try running w/o a batter installed, just ac adapter. Any battery older than 2 1/2 years old is suspect. And of course, look for broken dc power jacks.

IMHO, 77gb a week is excessive for home use.(today, in a few months maybe not) Why not just sign up for business service and eliminate this problem, plus get better service? At home, regular 3mbps service costs $61.01 per month with Comcast, I pay extra for the 6mbps/2mbps service which runs $72.05 per month. Both services generally take 24-48 hours for a tech to arrive on site if there is a a problem. Meanwhile for $79.95 a month you can get business service with a static IP address 3mps upload (download is up to 20mbps depending on where you live), all with a 4 hour response time for service. Seems like a no brainer.

Is there really 4 players in the wireless market? I live in the mid atlantic and t-mobile is non-existant with barely 1 signal bar coverage along the 2 major highways, and zero bars in both the metro core and suburbs. Sprint/Nextel has slightly better coverage with good signal along the highways, mediocre coverage downtown, with medium coverage in the suburbs with LOTS of holes in coverage. AT&T has good coverage everywhere, however, their mobile data service is dialup speed, nothing high speed in our area. Verizon has amazing coverage and high speed everwhere, but it's Verizon! It's like selling your soul to the devil. Pretty much there is a mononpoly, Verizon, that is it. Maybe you can say there's a Duopoly, but AT&T only has the people that got kicked off Verizon for non-payment, etc. There definately needs to be more players in the marketplace, you shouldn't have to spend $100++ a month for service. I barely use my phone, so I use Verizon's pay-as-you-go which is a fair deal @ $30 a month with no taxes, but $0.10 per text, so I hate when I receive those. If texting were free I'd be pretty happy with price. I just hate the cheapest plan is $39.95 a month + taxes = $46.xx + texting plan = $56.xx a month. So,the $30 gophone works for me, because I can do 250 texts and still be cheaper than a plan.