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Perhaps one day soon we will have some good news to report on our AOL customer. Today saw us visiting them again when their AOL Broadband wasn’t working yet again!

Upon arrival we checked out everything to find it had magically started to work. A phone call to AOL Technical Support saw us speaking with James. Within a few minutes he informed us that all AOL UK Broadband customers get routed through a server farm in the US and the said farm has been down for the best part of two days.

The Register has reported that NTL had a serious security breach this week in their fault reporting telephone service. Have a read at the full story:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/09/27/ntl_recorded_message/

Only time and an NTL investigation will reveal if this was a disgruntled employee or if their systems were indeed compromised. Either way this is a serious breach and a source of embarassment for the massive cable and telco provider.

Well it would seem that it takes a few weeks for settling in time with AOL Broadband. The Fife based customer, who chose to upgrade from their dial-up access to silver and then onto gold broadband, has not contacted us for assistance for the last week. Thank goodness since every support incident has been an AOL system problem, something totally outwith the control of the customer or RSL.

The last occurence, which we haven’t blogged on yet was interesting. The customer phoned AOL to be told that the router wasn’t one of the supported ones and was not correctly configured. Further the support representative sent him a copy of Ad-Aware SE, informing the customer that this would fix their problem!

Luckily we were passing the customer’s door that afternoon. One of our support engineers popped in and spoke with an AOL support person. Our engineer retold the story of the customer’s experience earlier that morning and started to query the obvious holes in the sequence of events. The AOL support representative was very knowledgeable and within a minute confirmed the router settings were 100% correct, before going on to admit the earlier problem was in fact down to something called “an Affinity Bit” being incorrectly configured. Once again the problem lay in the systems of AOL.

As for the Ad-Aware SE, the customer hadn’t run it all the way through to remove any adware, spyware or related nasties. This means we found them in the same state as when he couldn’t get connected. We ran various Adware detection and removal utilities and couldn’t find anything that would cause the AOL connectivity problems. The support representative we spoke with even admitted that he couldn’t understand why the customer would have been asked to run it. Our conclusion, in light of this sequence of events, is that this was a pacifier to get the very irrate customer off the AOL freecall support line.

Hopefully, all the AOL configuration and settings will now be correctly set-up to allow the customer to connect with the full power of AOL Gold.

RSL will most definitely not being going with AOL for the provision of our broadband service in a few weeks.

There are a number of companies, including many of the high street computer stores, offering support and service for your computer upgrades and breakdowns. This makes the selection of a company to fix your broken computer, upgrade a system or for general IT infrastructure work a difficult job, fraught with dangers. Not all companies are using technicians and engineers with sufficiently qualified technicians and engineers, backed up by years of experience.

Roundtrip Solutions Limited only use graduate engineers whom have been factory trained by companies such as IBM, Motorola and Sun Microsystems. The combined experience of our engineers equates to decades of man years within the IT and electronics industry.

This doesn’t mean we will charge the earth for a support call - indeed, it means the complete opposite. These years of experience ensure we spend a minimal time diagnosing the problem before proceeding to rectify the fault and placing preventative measures in place to assist in preventing the problem re-occurring.

Our main area of coverage is Fife, Tayside and Perth and Kinross. However, we are willing to travel further for people seeking high quality service and support at low prices. Remember we also have a diverse line of computer products and services available. Please contact us for a no-obligation quote or for advice.

It is just over six weeks until broadband will be coming to Freuchie. The arrival of broadband technologies will soon result in all kinds of new possibilities and open up new markets for Roundtrip Solutions Limited…. Watch this space!

Carrying on from the AOL story earlier this week. Trying to use a router with AOL Silver will only cause you grief. It would appear AOL systems may have occasion to lock the screen name account even when you have logged out. Means you can’t log back in without calling their support people to unlock the account.

Hope this information helps out the AOL customers who may be considering AOL Silver and having more than one computer attached to the network, even if only one will ever be connected at any one time.

For those individuals who really must use AOL with more than one computer, whether that be only one at a time or simultaneously, the best advice is to consider paying the extra money for Gold or Platinium.

How often do you think about security?

Well have a read at the following article and think again:

Disturbing!

Need help with your security? Why not contact us to hear how Roundtrip Solutions Limited can help.