I found this site, set up by the 4 Credit Bureaus, here: https://www.optoutprescreen.com/?rf=t

I've known about using the internet to make and receive calls for over a year, but held back because of my wife. She was concerned that we would be without a phone service if there was a power outage like the one we had 2 summers ago here on the East coast.

However, now that we are moving, she has relented, I have decided to switch to Vonage. They were one of the originators of the service, and they are the cheapest - $25 a month for unlimited calls nationwide and Canada. At 3 cents a minute to the UK to call my family and friends, they are one third the price of AT&T. And, we are able to keep our existing landline number.

The service is called Voice over IP, and works with your broadband internet service. You just attach the Vonage device to your cable modem, and then attach the base unit of your cordless phone to one of the ports on the device. I have numerous devices that require an internet connection, so I'll need a router with at leat 5 ports to feed into 2 desktop PC's, a wireless access point, my Replay (a personal video recorder similar to a TiVo) plus the Vonage VOIP device.

The whole process takes 20 working days. We will save about $50 per month on our phone bill.

The laptop was under a year old, and was within the warranty period.
Many people don't realize just how expensive it is to replace a laptop screen - typically it can cost around $1000.

According to my friend, Toshiba refused to repair the laptop saying that the screen was not covered by their warranty. When my friend challenged this, asking where it stated in the warranty that the screen was excluded, the customer service person became rude and the conversation ended.

His only recourse now is escalating the issue with more senior people at Toshiba, contacting the Better Business Bureau or calling a journalist at a PC magazine, which may have more influence with Toshiba due to it's readership and clout. Either way, this will be a time-consuming and stressful experience.

So, make sure you check out your laptop warranty's terms before you buy one, particularly if you are buying a Toshiba.

I continue to recommend IBM Thinkpad laptops. I regularly hear good reports about their support department when it comes to repairing or replacing defective parts. I also have first-hand experience of IBM support - they recently replaced my battery when I complained that it fit loosely into the casing.

You can do a lot worse than picking up a Thinkpad T42 right now.

This could be caused by Trendmicro, who manufacture the PC-Cillin Internet Security/Antivirus program. They released an update last Friday that caused many PCs running Windows XP Service Pack 2 to lock up. The update, which was remedied shortly afterwards with a newer update, causes the CPU to run at 100%, effectively stopping the PC from working.

In order to fix this, you have to restart in Safe Mode (hit the F8 key repeatedly at startup) go to the Trend Micro / Internet Security 2005 folder in Program Files, and delete files which start with the letters LPT$VPN followed by 3 numbers starting with 5**)

For free help, call Trendmicro at 888.856.1962 or 800.864.6027

This was a rather unfortunate slip up by a company that otherwise makes an excellent security program.

We are currently renting an apartment on the ground floor of a Brownstone and the owners, who live above us, have just sold the house, so we have to find somewhere else to live by the 1^st June.

Fortunately, I just managed to sell my apartment in the UK so armed with a deposit, we decided to try and buy somewhere in Park Slope. My PC support business has been going really well and many of my clients live locally, and we both love the neighborhood.

We started looking at open houses a few weeks back, and got a feel for the market pretty quickly when, on the first weekend, we saw a place we liked and decided to call the sellers the same day to ask for a second viewing. The sellers told us that they had already received an offer, but would definitely keep our details just in case the bid they had already accepted fell through.

So we continued going to open houses each weekend and a few weeks later we came across an apartment we really liked on the third floor of a brownstone. It had really nice period detail, and a living room that opened onto a private roof deck. We loved it and decided to make an offer.

The real estate broker (who we’ll call A&H) explained that there would be a ‘closed bidding’ process that would last 5 days. All interested parties would put in their highest bid by a specified date (which would remain completely hidden from all other bidders) and the winner would be announced once the deadline had passed.

So we put in our bid and called our mortgage broker to prepare a mortgage pre-qualification letter as requested by the real estate broker. We then got a call from the real estate broker asking who our mortgage broker was. The real estate broker then ‘suggested’ we use their recommended broker as it would ensure that there was no question that we had somehow manipulated our broker into writing a letter that stated that our credit was better than it actually was. My wife, a lawyer, thought that was tantamount to ‘steering’ - something that is illegal. We wanted the property so we agreed to go to their broker for the letter. We then put in our bid. On the final day, our broker called us and said that properties such as the one we were bidding on usually sold well above the asking price, and asked us if we would like to revise upwards our confidential closed bid before it was presented to the vendors. We thought about it, and deciding that we’d be very upset if we lost by a matter of a few thousand dollars, agreed to raise our bid another $5000. We then sat back and waited.

On Saturday morning I received a call from the broker, Unfortunately, we had lost the bid. My heart sank, but we had our chance and had put in our best offer. So we started the rounds of going to more open houses and put the loss behind us.

A few days later my wife got a call from the broker. ‘Were we still interested in the property?’ Apparently, the winning bid had fallen through and we were the highest bid left standing. My wife called me to check; we both agreed we still wanted the property, so she got back to the broker immediately to say ‘yes’. The broker called her back a few minutes later, asking for both our social security numbers. My wife gave our numbers to the broker. A few minutes later, we received a third call from the broker. Although we were the winning bid, and the owners really liked us, they wanted to know if we would up our bid. At that point I asked my wife to get the broker on the line in a three-way phone call. I was angry and wanted to ask the broker what was going on.

 'Had we not won the bid legitimately by following their rules', I asked? The higher bids had fallen by the wayside perhaps, because they bidders were not serious. We, on the other hand, were very serious and we were ready to go ahead with the purchase. The broker coudn't really disagree, and blamed the higher bids for making the vendor's believe the broker had underpriced the property.

We agreed to sleep on it and called the broker back  the following morning to confirm that we were not prepared to bid any higher. If the ground rules had been broken once, who was to say that the owners would not look for a higher bid after accepting ours, and then pull out of the deal at a later stage? We expected the broker and the owners to honor their side of the bargain – it was their moral and ethical obligation, I said. The broker said she would get back to us. Three hours later my wife called me to tell me that apartment was back on the brokers website, with another open house scheduled for that weekend. We never heard back from that broker.