Foreign Perspectives

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Is it just me, or does everyone out there think that Vista is rubbish?

I’ve a nice new Vista ready computer that came with Vista Business installed yet it will only run for about two hours before it hangs up. Not only does it hang up, but it stops working in a very peculiar way: when I start using it, many keyboard shortcuts work yet after an hour or so they stop working.

And then, there’s the updates. Every single time I need to reboot it (which is easily three times a day) it has more software updates to install.

Now that the “two hours” before it hangs seems to be reducing, I’m seriously looking into scrapping it altogether and installing Linux. The one thing that’s stopped me doing that so far is that I’ve a lot of information inside Outlook which I don’t think would transfer into a Linux setup but since Outlook constantly stops working anyway, I figure that I’m going to lose all that information sooner or later anyway so I’ve started looking into dual boot options to easy the transition.

I think Microsoft have squarely shot themselves in the foot with this one: not only is the file format not compatible with older versions but the keyboard shortcuts that we’ve all learnt don’t work and to cap it all the software is the most flakey that I’ve come across for many years.

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Ah, now, that’s the question, isn’t it?

The original idea for the plan was hatched when google started offering to let you label sites as being targeted at specific countries. As a trial, we popped the twins of some sites on either side of the Atlantic and monitored them to see how things went.

Naturally, the profile of the site visitors changed depending on where they were notionally hosted. So, an American site would obviously pull in more Americans and a European site would pull in more British. However, the google trick only works for google of course and we sometimes get significant traffic from other search engines and, as always, there’s a lot of traffic that you can’t pin down to a specific source.

In the meantime, we were running down the sites hosted on our original European host which was going to save us something like $20/month once that exercise was complete (European hosting services are mostly complete ripoffs). So, we pencilled in some of that to establish a beach head in America. In fact, for under $100 a year we managed to get both a primary and a backup hosting service!

Obviously, the new sites won’t do overlly well to begin with so our little experiment will need to run for at least a year before we’ll know if it was a worthwhile experiment. Somehow I think that it will: already we have picked up one new property listing in America and they’ve already got a booking from us!

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When you’re shopping around for car insurance, after a while it starts to sink in that all the sites are pretty much the same.

Most of them are but one car insurance site that is that little bit different is Car Insurance Rates. Sure, it’s got the standard quote engine that all sites seem to sport these days and the questions that they ask are pretty much the same as the other car insurance sites ask. Of course, they have to be as that’s what the insurance companies base their rates on.

However, where this site is different is that the quote engine seems almost an after-thought as the site is built along the lines of a general insurance advice site. For example, they tell you which cars are the most commonly stolen (don’t buy a Honda Civic if you want to avoid that!). Which are the most difficult to insure: a list that’s dominated by imports as you’d expect but not in the sequence that I would have put them in. Naturally, the counterpart to that list is those that are easiest to insure which has all the traditional domestic autos in it. All that information is obviously available to the insurance companies but this is the first site I’ve come across which collects it together for you.

It doesn’t just give rundowns on the car but provides more general advice as to how to get the lowest insurance and so on.

Worth looking at for the advice and guidance that they have on the site and you might even end up buying your insurance through them too!

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