My Parents want at the ripe age of 65 to go on the internet.
Not being very good with anything technical it has fallen to me to get them sorted (oh joy).
Now they live just under 100 miles away from me and i dont want to have to keep going up to bridlington to sort them out every 5 minutes so they need a reliable provider that doesn't stop all the time.
They also need to be cheap..... like my father.
Any suggestions or help would be appreciated?
(tried Sky but they do not own the exchange yet, BT want £15 per month and Eclipse were £7 but again the exchange is not part of their group so £15)
I put my mother in law on abelalways - they have been great even when on the really odd occasion some support has been needed.
http://www.abelalways.co.uk/ips-adsl-packages.html
She used to use "Abel Gratis" which was a pay per use internet for dial up and when we decided to move her to broadband they went out of their way to help, even migrating all her old account details to the new one so that she didn't have to change her email settings :)
Cheers BB.
Looking on their site it is still in the £15 mark with £47 setup fee.
I would like to quote what my father would say about that but it would be mostly ****** followed by ******* :P
I think the challenge he faces is that if he pays cheap he'll get cheap. If it goes wrong it could be a nightmare.
Suppose it will just have to balance out to how much risk he wants to accept.
Have a look here;
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/search/package/basic.html
I think it is just very unlucky about the exchange otherwise they could get the £5 sky or £8 Eclipse offers.
I will try and find out if the exchange is on a plan to be changed or not.
cheers again BB
I know it won't help if they're offline, but I find LogMeIn an invaluable tool for helping struggling rellies with their computer woes.
Dead easy to set up and secure to remotely access their machines. Plus it's free which is always a bonus.
https://secure.logmein.com/welcome/get_logmein_free/signup.asp
Like I say - not much use if the net goes down but great for everything else :thumbsup2:
Quote from: Penfold;272819I know it won't help if they're offline, but I find LogMeIn an invaluable tool for helping struggling rellies with their computer woes.
Dead easy to set up and secure to remotely access their machines. Plus it's free which is always a bonus.
https://secure.logmein.com/welcome/get_logmein_free/signup.asp
Like I say - not much use if the net goes down but great for everything else :thumbsup2:
I dont have much knowledge about UK based ISP's, but i gotta agree with Pen, LogMeIn is a great tool to help solve issues on your families computers over the net, easy to setup and just works..
I got it installed on most of my familys puters these days
To be perfectly honest there is not such thing as cheap and reliable. It's a balance. I was with Carphone warehouse for about 2 weeks. Dirt cheap, rubbish speed and service. Was with BT, reliable but more expensive, and not the fastest. I'm with Nildram now, speed is great, never goes down, but then again it costs more.
£15 for broadband really isn't bad, and having used BT for a decent chunk of time I'd have to say they're worth that much. They do all the homehub stuff now too, so it might be worth looking into a package.
My granddad uses BT, he's in his late 80s and loves it. He's used it since dial up, and if he can use it anyone can. In my experience skimping ends badly with internet, and for the sake of the difference (£84 a year) I don't think it's worth it.
Cheers for the comments guys.
Pen i will certainly look at that when they are sorted.
I realise not everyone runs it, but my folks are actually on MSN (using the official client). I find the inbuilt help system in that to be pretty good, in that I can take control of my Dad's computer whenever anything goes wrong but he still has a net connection, and unlike a lot of VNC alternatives that just show him a login screen while i'm faffing with stuff he actually gets to see what i'm doing so he learns about how i'm fixing stuff and can hopefully do it himself next time.
My folks were with Tiscali and had no end of issues. They switched to BT with a version 2 HomeHub and I have to admit I was very impressed. Had a poke around the Hub's software and it was well designed (IMO), easy to use and setup but seemed to have enough advanced functionality if you went looking for it for people who were wanting it, but weren't techie enough to just run their own gateway box.
Or maybe I was just swung by the fact that it all seemed to be perl scripts on the backend ;)
LogMeIn is fantastic. I use it at work all the time to help clueless company Reps who have fecked up their laptop in a dodgy wifi cafe in China, I cannot reccomend it enough.
As for ISP's, Zen are the best I've dealt with but they can be quite pricey. It really depends how much they're willing to spend, but Zen's helpdesk has been seriously world class whenever I've had to call them.