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  • Car Servicing

    Car Servicing

    Always useful to know…

    The assertion that “…it is a condition of the manufacturer’s warranty that work must be carried out by an authorised dealer” is a commonly misheld belief, and is absolutely and categorically incorrect. For a dealer or manufacturer to state that work must be carried out by an authorised dealer, or that all replacement parts must be manufacturer authorised, is in breach of basic European (and thus UK) statutory law.

    I have researched this issue extensively, and my assertions are backed up by the Competition Commission, Trading Standards (Consumer Direct), and the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR). Furthermore, I have personally challenged a manufacturer on this issue (Mercedes) and have been successful in forcing them to honour their warranty; they backed-down before I took them to court.

    The relevant law is referred to as the the “European Block Exemption” (BER) and is encompassed within the Competition Act 1998. The law applies to all suppliers of cars within Europe, but as luck would have it, I found a link to a motor trade article referring to Nissan, which was the brand of car specifically mentioned in the original thread. In this case, Nissan were required to ‘back down’ over refusal to honour a warranty after the owner had a non-Nissan part fitted:

    http://www.motortrader.com/25215/Nissan-backtracks-over-warr…

    For further information:

    http://www.berr.gov.uk/consumers/fact-sheets/page38070.html (Specifically Q4)

    Naturally, if you choose dealership maintenance and servicing for peace of mind, then that is your prerogative, but by my calculations, the additional costs of ‘authorised’ dealerships are not good value for money, even when it comes to considering any value that such servicing may have when selling second-hand.

    There is a lot of money to be saved by not using a dealership for servicing and maintenance!

  • Computers & Child Safety

    Computers & Child Safety

    My daughter has her own laptop which she has in her bedroom. For safety I use CyberPatrol to restrict her usage of it. However, she’s come across a problem with it, that I believe also affects most other software of this type.

    It has time management facilities, where I can stop her from using the PC in the middle of the night. If you wind the system clock backwards it knows tampering has occurred and stops access until it’s resolved. But if you move the clock forward it can’t tell (after all, you could simply have just had the PC turned off during this time). She now knows this and can access the laptop when she shouldn’t.

    So, I contacted CyberPatrol to ask them if there was a technical solution to this. There isn’t but they said…

    our software cannot replace the most powerful Internet Filter of all, you as the parent or administrator of our software and the computer use in general.

    So that’s the get-out clause. They sell software to try and monitor and restrict usage. When it doesn’t work, it’s up to me as I should be keeping an eye on it anyway. So why bother?

    Indeed, I won’t. My licence is up soon and I didn’t even bother waiting for the expiry date – last night I uninstalled CyberPatrol and installed (pause for breath) Windows Live OneCare Family Safety. It’s free but doesn’t have the time management functionality but, hey, when it can be so easily over-ridden, what’s the point?

  • Football

    Football

    I’m not a football fan, I’ll admit. But then I’m not a huge sports fan generally (watching or taking part, the latter of which should be obvious).

    However, I don’t get those that are.

    “Oh yes, I’m a fan of Manchester United because I was born there”

    Yes, and you now live in Nottingham, have done for a long time and have had and raised children here. Shouldn’t you be, say, a fan of Notts County or Nottingham Forest?

    Don’t be silly.

    So why aren’t you a Manchester City fan? Was United the better team at the random time that you decided to like football, by any chance?

    And why that team because you were born there? Because it has Manchester in the name and is based there? But has a team and management that aren’t. Many of whom aren’t even from this country?

    Basically, I can’t see the reason to cling to one particular team because you have some connection to that location – it means nothing any more. And that’s why I like FIFAs idea of restricting the number of foreign players in a team. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to happen because of Europe anti-discriminatory laws.

    What I’d really like to see, though, are teams that only consist of people from that area. So Manchester United – and City – would have to be teamed and managed by people from Manchester. Born and grew up in Manchester, not born in Brazil and shipped in at a later date. Surely this will then get back to how the sport was originally meant to be? Then you go to a match and be proud of a team that really represents the area.

    It’ll never happen though and in the meantime we have the debacle of watching English premier league football teams managed and completely teamed by foreign players.

  • How to fix IE from seeing your Windows PC as a Mac

    How to fix IE from seeing your Windows PC as a Mac

    When Microsoft Update thinks I’m using a Mac. Yes, last night I went to get some updates from Microsoft Update and I got the message…

    Thank you for your interest in obtaining updates from our site.

    This website is designed to work with Microsoft Windows operating systems only.
    To find updates for Microsoft products that are designed for Macintosh operating
    systems, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/mac/.

    Nice. I was using Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP MCE SP3.

    It knows which system I’m using from the “user agent” but one of many websites which displays your current user agent information, showed that I was happily using Windows. Weird.

    Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; WTClient2)

    Weirder still was that if I used IE Tab in Firefox, the page would appear without a problem. As IE Tab simply uses Internet Explorer but in Firefox, it shouldn’t have been any different. Again, I checked the user agent and that was the same as running it under IE normally.

    Double weird.

    Anyway, after a reboot even IE Tab stopped working.

    Googling the issue found that most people seemed to have Spyware or Virus’. In panic, I did a check but found nothing. However, I also came across a Microsoft blog on how to reset all of IE 7’s settings – I tried that and Microsoft Update is now working again.

  • We'll Meat Again

    We'll Meat Again

    My good friend Ruth was a young 30 last week and we all went out on Saturday night to – and you can tell she must be a good friend – a vegetarian restaurant.

    Now, I’m not averse to vegetables. I just like them to accompany a good piece of meat (or fish). So, with another good friend, Dufty, we devised a plan. We will open our own restaurant. A carnivore restaurant named “We’ll Meat Again”. The only vegetable allowed will be potato (for chips). It will be meat, meat, meat and pudding. And we’ll site it across the road from a vegetarian restaurant so pale-faced people can get their fix.

    Since that discussion I think “Would Like to Meat” would be an even better name.

    And if that fails, I think my plans for a meat-based perfume would be a winner.