Jesus... Most of my kit's Acer; you get what you pay for with them, but I've never actually had anything break before. The worst laptops I've seen recently have been Fujitsu and Toshiba.

I had an Acer laptop. Bought it when at uni. Lasted me seven years. Failed mobo after three months and no issues after that. £650 at the time iirc. Worked fine until sister knocked a glass of water on to it.

The majority of my stuff from them has been the cheapest in their range and I've never had any bother 'til now. I'd certainly buy from them again since it was only a minor thing, but it was weird when it happened

Backing up my drives.

The amount of people in CoD incapable of realising that the enemy's air support is really a big deal when attempting to win.

The electoral form has come round and the only thing stopping me from just throwing it in the bin is the bit about credit checks by outside parties... The whole tone of it just makes me think, 'Yeah, fcuk you.'

'You are required by law to give the information asked for' and 'You could be fined up to £1000' really doesn't work for me, especially in a country that spies on it's citizens just because it can, and also doesn't have a bugger worth voting for

Will I actually be able to phone all the companies that I need to today instead of putting it off again. I know at least one of the calls will be diverted to India

How totally [LIFTED] useless bt are. They've erroneously cut off my internet and I can't be reconnected, so they have to reorder it for me. So my business has no email for 5 days and our external telephone extensions don't work and I can't use my mobile to interact with the phone system. I have to be in the office all day every day to answer the phone.

If internet was that important to me, I'd have a backup. 5 days outage is not that uncommon for a broadband line with no guaranteed service level.

I must have been very lucky the longest outages I have had have been as a result of switching. I have had a couple of days with slow speeds but no outright cut offs.

It's hugely uncommon in my experience. They promised over 99.9 uptime, so my backup is only okay for a few hours. It's hard to have a backup as everything's dependent on the IP address.

It seems you can plan for a network error, but not for a clerical one. British Telecom are an absolute shower of fools.

Yes the back office is the problem. My phone line took weeks to be connected because of cock ups in the sales team and then the 10 day cooling off period that left me without any connection for a month. BT is a joke in terms of their broadband service.

I'd guess it happens to about one in ten thousand customers every year, which is hundreds of customers.

0.1% downtime is one working day per year, so you need four good years to balance it out.

With odds like that it makes it almost pointless for most individuals to prepare for such an outcome.

But essential for a business. We only have a few employees, but three broadband lines from two suppliers plus 3g in case the wires are cut. We can also redirect calls on the main number at the network level, so if the office is bombed everyone can work from home.

We're only talking a few quid a month, so its madness not to if you have any kind of turnover.

What does screw us is when the air con fails in Telehouse... But we've just opened a rack in Manchester, so there's redundancy there too now.