Wow! It really is “Comcastic”!

We’ve been using Verizon DSL at home for the past 6 years or so.  They’ve been good, quite reliable, and reasonably priced.  Recently, though, we’ve had the “need for speed”, and Verizon just couldn’t come through.  We were paying for 3mbps (down) / 768k (up), but only really realized about half of that speed.  We were too far from the CO to get any faster.

I began shopping around.

Verizon DSL couldn’t do any better for us, FiOS isn’t available in our area, and everything else was either 1) only comparable on speed, or 2) just too expensive.  Who saves the day?  Comcast.  For $19.99/month for the first 6 months (+ $60 install fee), we decided to bit the bullet.  I’ve never been a huge cable Internet fan – fluctuating speeds, rumors of numerous outages, etc. – but I’ve never had cable Internet either. 

We setup an appointment to have them out between 8AM and noon today.

No phone calls or “acknowledgements” of our appointment, and 11:45AM quickly rolls around.  I was ready to lay waste to someone, but then the phone rings a few minutes later.  The technician arrived relatively on-time, and was very friendly.  After about 30 minutes, we were plugging in cables and testing out our service.  The Speakeasy “speedtest” pretty much tells it like it is…

Yeah… that’s 29mbps (down) / 2.6mbps (up).  Whoa!  I realize that those speeds will change with additional users online in the neighborhood, but still… that’s pretty amazing.

All in all, a pretty good experience thus far.  Here’s hoping that the rest of my “Comcastic!” switchover goes as well.

Branded Browsers = LAME

In the course of my day job (techy “IT” sys admin-type stuff), I deal with a fair number of new computers — laptops, desktop machines, servers, etc..  You home users typically have to wrangle with all of the preinstalled *crud* that comes with a new computer — here, here and here — but business clients, such as our company, usually get some say in what is and isn’t loaded.

Usually.

Our buddies at Dell evidently *have* to have their hand in something on these new computers.  Anything!  So what do they do?  Check it…

Honestly…how useless is that?  Does Dell really need to ‘brand’ my browser window?  Are the Dell-branded screen, laptop case, and bootup screens not enough?  Perhaps I’ll forget where I purchased my computer from??!  Well, Dell has the solution for that.  And how *exactly* is Dell (in this case) “providing Internet Explorer”?  Just by *allowing* it to be preloaded with the OS?  Hmmm.  Good thinking, guys — and thanks for the subtle reminder. 

May I suggest a few more “branding” opportunities that you’ve missed?

To be fair, I’ve seen other vendors pull the same, lame stunt <cough> COMCAST <cough>.  Thanks, but no thanks, guys.  We can do without it.

By the way, here’s how to remove that text.