Around a year ago, I was on the search for a PC Infra-Red remote to control Windows Media Center. The remote I acquired with my TV tuner card was somewhat inadequate. I was unable to find a remote sold on it’s own for a sensible price, so I purchased another tuner card solely so that I could use the extra buttons of the new remote. If only I had been able to find this remote while I was on my search.

This remote features just about any button you could ever want, and then some. It can be used to control just about any media player software you currently have on your computer. You can even use the remote to move your mouse cursor around the screen, and click on items. This feature works surprisingly well. What this means you can use the remote for extra stuff like a clicker for PowerPoint presentations.

There aren’t any drivers required for this remote, meaning there is no need to configure anything for it to work. While this may seem a little limiting, there are some hotkeys that can be set if you choose. There is not much this remote can’t control on your computer. It is built solid and even has an 18 metre range making it ideal for most environments.

There is only one annoyance I have with this remote and that is the NumLock. Each of the buttons towards the bottom of the remote has a number assigned to it for changing channels etc, but each button also serves another useful task such as navigation. It is a hassle to press the Numlock, and there is no indicator on the remote, or the computer informing you of if the Numlock is on or off. A small gripe for an otherwise worthwhile product.

PC Remote Controller is available from BudgetGadgets.com for $16 including shipping. You will need to fork out for a couple of AAA batteries before you can use it. Overall, I give this remote a big thumbs up with my main factors being the price, features and the overall simplicity of it. BudgetGadgets has quite a few other PC remotes, starting from just a few dollars.

Exclusive for Inspect My Gadget readers: Use the following coupon code for a 5% discount on any product you purchase from the entire BudgetGadgets website: CM5OFF7

There is one feature I wish to add to this setup, and that is a shared/network/remote clipboard. It would be really handy to be able to copy and paste text and images between the two computers. Text would be enough to keep me happy, but the ability to copy and paste images would be a real bonus.

I had seen some tools around the web in the past which I thought would do the job for me. I initially wanted to test them out to so that I could recommend the best one to the readers of Inspect My Gadget. I did not have any luck in getting any of them to work so I am turning this article over to you.

This article will take a look at a handful of Network Clipboard options which are all available for free online. I didn’t think it would be so hard to get this feature up and running, because there are existing applications designed for this task. I assumed it was a feature that many people would want, and possibly already use. Have you had success with getting similar functionality on your network? Please, let me know, this one has me stumped.

Normally when I write a post for Inspect My Gadget, I think of a feature I would like my computer to have, I do some research and some testing and then I post what I have found to be the best. In this case, I was completely unsuccessful in finding a solution.

Remote desktop has network clipboard functionality built in to it. It is something I took for granted. You are able to copy and paste between the local and remote computers. This is not suitable for my situation as it makes the KVM switch invalid. If I were to use remote desktop all the time to access the second computer, there would be frustrating performance issues.

I looked online and found the following Network Clipboards.

• Synergy
• The Network Clipboard
• Remote Clipboard
• nClip
• Clipster
• Network Clipboard

I downloaded them all and took them home to try out. I did no success with any of them. I did succeed in connecting some of these programs over the network, but even then I was unable to get the clipboards to sync. I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be something to do with how Vista works and handles its clipboard.

All of these programs run in the task-bar and all of the programs are designed for Windows XP unless stated. I can see many advantages to cross platform solutions. If I could copy and paste from Ubuntu, that would be a huge bonus.

Windows own clipbrd.exe:

clipbrd.exe comes with Windows XP. It is the clipboard viewer and it lets you see what data is in the clipboard. This can be copied to Vista to see the contents of Vistas clipboard. There are connect and disconnect options but these were greyed out for me. 

It looks like clipbrd may do what I want but I was unsuccessful in getting it to work. It requires old .clp files from NT/3.1 days. I tried to make my own clp file but clipbrd did not recognise it. Windows however did recognise it as a clipboard file as it changed the icon in Windows explorer.

I always like to use inbuilt features of the operating system where ever possible as it is usually a quicker and more reliable option. Clipbrd however is not part of XP even though it comes with it. It is some left over shrapnel from previous releases which they threw in for kicks.

Synergy

I visited a lot of sites and Synergy was mentioned as the ideal choice. It has a network clipboard built in, thought this is not the task it was designed for. Synergy allows you to share one keyboard and mouse between two computers. Once it is set up correctly, moving your mouse cursor from one computer to another, gives you control of that computer.

I can see this being frustrating in a KVM situation because Synergy itself is a virtual KVM switch. It is designed for you to have both computers with monitors set up side by side. If the software and the KVM can both be in control of different computers simultaneously, conflicts will occur.

I was not successful in getting this program to work. There was some very positive feedback for it online, so it is probably worth checking it out if you want to use it for what it was designed for.

Available for free from SourceForge.

NetClipboard

This program looked promising as it was designed to do exactly what I wanted. It’s only limitation before installing it seemed to be that NetClipboard could only be used to copy text.

Netclipboard is a little odd as you don’t need a client on each machine. You only need to run the program on once of them. As dJsLiM (the author of clipster) says, it’s all a bit too magical.

The installation was fine. There are runtime files which need to be installed along side it. These were easy enough to install so I started the program up. I followed all the instructions I could get my hands on and I still could not get the two computers to talk to each other. Everything looked like it should have worked, it just didn’t.

Available for free from SourceForge.

Remote Clipboard

Remote Clipboard is the most modern out of the clipboard programs I tested. It was also the most professional of the releases. The install was nice and clean. The program came up with an interface which offered more options than the other clipboard utilities.

Remote Clipboard looked good as it did not require any special keys to work as some of the others did. You can use the same context menu that pops up when you right click to copy and paste text and images normally.

Remote Clipboard automatically scans the network for other computers running the software. It successfully found my second computer. I was unable to copy and paste though. The clipboard did not change from the local machines clipboard.

Available for free from topqualityfreeware.

nClip:

Nclip is a stand-alone executable. This program asks you for a shared network path rather than an IP address or machine name. In this path, nclip creates a file called clip which contains the copied text. I was able to copy data from XP into this file, but Vista would not paste the text from the file. I could not copy to the file from Vista either.

I have confidence that this will work between two Windows XP machines because it worked for me on the XP side.

nClip uses ctrl-alt-c to copy and ctrl-alt-v to paste. I recommend giving this program a go if you have two Windows XP machines. There are even sounds when you have done a successful copy or paste, which is quite comforting.

Available for free from asc.sk

Clipster:

Clipster is coded in Python so it can be ported to various operating systems easily. It uses the same ctrl-alt-c, ctrl-alt-v keyboard combinations as nClip. There is support for both text and images.

I could not get this program to launch in Vista, and I had very minimal success with loading the program in XP. I could not test this program out any further as I couldn’t get the client to load in Vista. The best best thing about the program is the website. The guy has a sense of humour.

Available for free from SourceForge.

Network Clipboard:

Network clipboard is a bit more complicated than the others. It has a few benefits such as encryption and password protection. It also works a bit differently from the others. You type in the address of the computer you want to send the text to and press send. The text gets copied into a window on the second computer. It can then be copied from this window.

This program did not work for me either. I was able to get it running on each of the computers but I could not get the software on each machine to connect to each other.

It looks like you may be required to copy the text into it, press send and then copy the text back out of it on the second machine. It’s a little bit messy. 

Available for free from Globware.

A couple of work-arounds

I have been wondering if there are work-arounds that will allow me to copy text back and forth between computers. The solutions below are both hopeless and highly impractical, but they are the only working solutions I have found so far.

IRC (Internet Relay Chat): You could create your own chat room on an IRC server. For each computer you log in as a different user. If you copy and paste text into it on one computer, you could switch to the other and copy and paste it to where you want. This is the best solution if the programs above don’t work for you. This is a desperate solution.

Shared Text Document: You could create a text document on a network share. If you create a shortcut on your desktop so that you can access it quickly, you could copy and paste text into it. You would have to save it and close it before switching across to the second computer. This is messy and should be avoided. It will take minutes to copy the line of text. There’s more clicking than you would want to do.

Conclusion:

There is no positive outcome for me in this article. If I had two computers side by side on a desk and neither of those computers were Vista, Synergy is probably the way to go. Sharing a keyboard and mouse clears up desk space greatly. A KVM switch clears it even more by reducing the amount of monitors you have.

If you have two XP computers, it is worth looking into Remote Clipboard. It felt like this one would work.

Have you had any success with such applications? Have you wanted to do the same thing and found a clever way to go about it? Please let me know in the comments section below.

I hope you have found this article useful, if not only to save you time from finding and running through these programs yourself. Please stick around and check out some other articles at Inspect My Gadget.

To be fair to Vista, most of the problems I came across were related to video card drivers which have nothing to do with Vista itself. I started off this experiment using the drivers that came with my video card. I soon found that an update was required and this allowed most games to work without any other tweaking.

This article will look at a broad range of games which have been popular over the last 8 years. I will also explain my successes and difficulties installing each of these. All games are legitimate copies and cross many genres.

I don’t claim to be a big gamer, though the games that I have, I like to run smoothly. I have not bothered running benchmarks on these games. All that matters to me is if the game loads up alright and then runs at a speed which makes the game usable. If the game crashes with all updates, I treat that as a failure.

Inspect My Gadgets Test System:

I recently bought a new computer to run Vista. I didn’t want to spend the big money so I got hardware which I thought would be adequate. It turns out that it is more than enough to run Vista comfortably.

Hardware includes:
Intel Core2 Duo Processor: 6600 @ 2.40GHz
2GB RAM
Nvidia Geforce 7600GT 256MB Video Card
Vista Ultimate

I have updated all the drivers to the most recent I could find as of 01/06/07

The games and how they installed and played:

Deus EX: We are going back a few years with this one. Installation was very clean and there was not one problem with getting this running. Once in the game, it ran smoothly and made use of the hardware that I had in the Vista computer.

I ran through the training mission and Deus Ex worked flawlessly.

MDK2: Another game which takes us back to the start of this decade is MDK2. Installation was quick and easy and Vista did not complain about anything. I played through the early stages of this game and there was no lock ups. Yet again, another flawless installation.

Colin Mcrae Rally 2005: This game installed fine and there were no apparent problems during the install. As I tried to run the game, it reported that I was using an unsupported operating system.

I went to the Codemasters website and downloaded and installed Update Patch 1. This did not solve the problem.

I then proceeded to install the 64bit patch also available at the codemaster website. This allowed the game to launch and run smoothly on my computer. Once I was in the game, I came across no problems.

Medal of Honor, Pacific Assault: The install went flawlessly. The game loaded with the first attempt and I started the first mission. I had a lock up at the same spot, very early on in the game. I retried this 3 times and each time it locked up at a similar spot.

I installed the patch from the EA website and tried running the game again. The lockup happened, this time earlier than before. It was at this stage I tried to update my Video Card drivers. This solved the issue and the game ran well. I love the Drill Instructors speech at the start. It was good to hear it again.

This was a really nice game to see running under my new Video card. The image quality was much better than I had in XP using a 6600 GT.

Medal of Honor Warchest, Allied Assault: The install and gameplay were both flawless. There is nothing else to say. This may be due to having the latest video drivers installed. It is quite an old game now, so I expected success with this. With this success, I expected the expansions below to work smoothly also.

Spearhead Expansion Pack: This Installed painlessly. I had a couple of problems with video settings of Spearhead. The graphic defaults had set themselves to be ridiculously low. After adjusting these in the game, everything was fine. Being an old game, I installed the update patches which went on without fault. I worked my way through this whole game and there were no problems. With the new video card, it was like I was playing a new game.

Breakthrough Expansion Pack: This was the trickiest of all the installs I am covering in this article. My computer was reporting that I needed a Video Card that could handle certain textures. I already had the latest drivers on by this stage. I had to download nhancer which allows you to change some video settings for particular games, working closely with the Nvidia drivers. Once this was installed, I did not need to make any changes to the games profile, as it loaded the best settings. The game then ran really well in single player.

This was the only game I tested under multi-player and I did not have a great deal of luck with this. The game loaded and I could see the buildings fine, but it appeared as if the other players in the game were sharking (dropping under map) and this made it very hard to play. It was still possible to get a few kills but frequently I would find someone popping up directly in front of me, out of nowhere. I am sure this will be fixed with future Video Driver updates but currently, I will have to play this in XP. Many players have had success with his game in Vista.

Need for Speed Carbon: This is one of the more recent games I have tested for this article. The install went well and the game loaded without any problems. I was able to play single races fine but in career mode, when I was in a police chase, the game would lock up. This happened to me twice out of around 4 chases. I assume this is a video problem also and in the future, this game will work fine on my machine. Many other people have reported complete success with this game.

Call of Duty 2:When I tried to install this, Vista reported that there were known compatibility issues. The installer allowed me to continue and the install went through without problems. I was able to play through a few levels of this game and it ran great. I think the new video drivers may have made the previous issues non existent. This was a great game to play utilising the new hardware in my system.

FIFA 2005: The install for this ran very well and there were no warnings or errors throughout. The game loaded fine and I was able to play a couple of matches. FIFA 2005 ran very well and I came across no problems.

Spellforce II – Shadow Wars: This game came with my Video Card. It is the most recent game I have. I had trouble installing it initially but yet again it turns out the Video drivers were initially at fault. It is odd though that a video card company will give you a game with their card to show the cards capabilities, and then give you drivers that aren’t up to date enough to run the game. This game ran flawlessly also. I didn’t get out of starting town because I got bored but everything in the town was fine. This game didn’t impress me much, and I don’t know why it was included as the example to see what you can get out of your video card, as the graphics were not spectacular.

All Seeing Eye: This program is used to connect to multi-player games, allowing you to see which players are on what servers in the games you predefine. This software downloaded and installed well. I was able to test it with Medal of Honor Breakthrough and I came across no problems.

Conclusion:

I had a really high success rate from installing and playing all of these games in Vista. The only dramas I had in the end were playing multi-player “Breakthrough” and “Need for Speed Carbon” locking up occasionally. The nice thing about Vista is that when it locks up, you don’t need to restart your computer, it will kick you back to the desktop. This is obviously a good thing.

The most common solution for getting any games running in Vista, is to install the latest video card drivers, generally available from Nvidia or ATI websites depending on your cards chipset, otherwise your computer manufacturer. These companies have not yet had enough time to enable all games to work flawlessly. They have come a long way since the very early days of Vista and they both release new driver updates regularly.

If you are not comfortable with computers and like to get straight into your games, you may come across some problems that you won’t be able to fix. The majority of games will work straight up, others you may need to search the web for solutions or ring up someone who knows about computers (family friend, not complicated enough for a computer tech) and they should be able to help you get up and running in whichever game you choose.

You can be confident that in 6 months, all new games will run under Vista and they will be spectacular at that.

If you enjoyed this article, please check out some of my other articles at Inspect My Gadget.

The hype surrounding Windows Vista was too much for me so I headed out to the shop and bought a new system capable of running Vista. I did not have much of an idea of what Vista would be like. I had read the occasional article and seen a few screen shots but I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

I took it home and hooked it all up and pressed the power button. The computer came to life and there was no login required to get to the desktop. I was greeted by the Welcome Center which showed me the specs of my new computer. There were a few shortcuts to look after various tasks such as transferring data from my old computer and to add/modify user accounts. I closed this window down and had a look around.

This is a brief article explaining my first few days with Vista. I have had good look around and found many nice features. It is likely that we will all come across Vista sometime in the future and this article will prepare you for your first touch of Vista. So far I love it though it is like a Rolls Royce without a gearbox; in that it looks very nice but you can’t do much with it yet. In general, current games do not work with it and you will probably do best sticking with XP unless you only want to run Microsoft Office apps which it does well. I look forward to seeing what it is capable of as the weeks and months roll on but at this stage, it doesn’t offer a great deal.

(Update – 10 Days in: Vista is running very well and stable. I have tried to get some of my games up and running in Vista and I have had great success. Please read my article “Vista Gaming: Will your games work under Vista?” for a complete rundown of my experience with gaming in Vista.)

A detailed list of what software has been tested and is known to work under Vista is at iexbeta.com.

There are many more new features than what is listed in this article and I am sure I will find many more nice surprises as I continue using Vista. These are a few of the highlights that struck me as I started my appreciation of Vista.

Interface:

There is a new taskbar which has the same functionality as the old one with a few nice additions such as preview windows for open applications which change in real time to what that screen is doing, so things like the visualisations in Media Player show up in these preview windows.

There is a new sidebar showing RSS feeds and an analog clock. As there is a clock already on the front of my computer as well as a clock in the task bar, I closed the sidebar as I don’t see it as being much use to me yet. I am sure worthwhile additions to this will be available in the near future.

A big change to the layout is the Start Menu. Your frequently used programs are still shown and on the right hand side of the new start menu is your music, pictures, videos etc. They have removed the “My” from the front of each of them. Everything is much tidier and easier to navigate around. I then went into the all programs section. This I did not like as it is more like an explorer window, where you click on a folder to show the programs in it, unlike previous versions of windows where the contents pop up. I can see this as getting nasty as more programs go onto the computer. The space for the list was not large enough and I have still not installed any extra applications.

There is also a search function where you can search for files or get to a website. There is no need to go into run as you can run files from this box.

It is all familiar and easy to use and there should be no dramas using this if you are used to the modern menu in XP(as opposed to classic).

All Windows have transparent features by default and it is a big improvement over XP. I won’t go too much into the visuals as screenshots won’t do the experience justice. It is very nice.

I have seen many reports on the web that Vista has copied a lot of Mac OS features. When something is good, you would adapt it. I am sure Mac OS used many XP features when it came out. It’s like a car company adding airbags. It is a good feature so other companies are bound to pick it up and add this feature.

All the icons have been recreated as you would expect with this major release. I really like the network connectivity icon in the task tray. It shows if you have access to local network or the internet. The single icon shows you so much. This is the same for many icons but this one stood out for me.

A lot of the new desktop effects just look nice and don’t offer anything to help you do things faster. Looking good is fine with me. I guess this desktop will look boring in 2 years time but I am sure that there will be some fairly fancy themes released in the future to get even better effects on your desktop.

File Locations:

Vista is much neater in the way it stores your files. It is all now in plain English and you don’t need to navigate so deep to get to where you need to get to from what I have seen so far. I am sure Microsoft still has some hidden files somewhere but I have not needed to get to them yet which is very comforting.

As well as the expected Program Files and Windows folder, each user has their own folder. There is no longer a need to go into “Documents and Settings” to reach this. Each user has a heap of folders associated with their profile. There is Documents, Music, Pictures, Video as well as things like saved games.

Also in Explorer there is no more “My Network Places”. This is replaced by “Network” which gives you everything you need to get around the other computers on your network.

I really liked that if I hooked up my camera or PDA, the memory cards show up in the listing of available drives, allowing you to easily copy your pictures off the drives. It even shows up how much space is available and used in the drive graphically under the icon.

These are all great improvements which make Vista nice to use over XP. I am looking forward to getting more familiar with it.

Sync Center:

While Windows XP did have a similar feature to see what was syncing, even combining task scheduler and SyncToy, the Sync Center offers so much more. It allows you to see all the items you have requested to sync and it allows you to schedule them.

Sync Center also reports your Pocket PC sync. It is so much nicer than what was possible in XP. It was never all that obvious that all this was possible in XP but now it has been brought out in the open as a big feature of Vista.

I am looking forward to writing articles about this and how to get the most out of it. While we could achieve much of this in XP, it was much messier as you will see from some of the articles already at Inspect My Gadget. This makes it all clean and easily recoverable.

Backup and Restore:

While XP had backup and Restore, Vista goes that 20 steps forward and allows you to restore individual folders. If you make a bad change or delete files, you can now easily get them back.

 All you need to do is right click on the folder and select “Restore previous versions”. You then get a a dialog as is the one on the left. It offers me to go back to any previous restore points which it has created automatically. As you can see from the times, it offers an update very frequently.

I am not sure how it is determined when a restore point will be made but from the picture, it looks like every change creates a new restore point. Time will tell.

There is also a new “Backup and Restore Center” in the control panel which looks much more user friendly than the backup and restore options in XP. I might even start using it.

Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC) :

This is not a feature of Vista but I am very excited about it. It is a free download from Microsoft. It does basically the same thing as ActiveSync, it just does it better. WMDC has a much nicer interface with less options to confuse users.

You have the same options to install and uninstall programs, view files on the device and setup partnerships. There are a few nice added features such as tools to extract pictures and place them in your “Pictures” folder, and the same options with music to keep your music player ready with the tracks you want.

This is a big step up from Activesync which had many updates over the time XP was available, with each update not offering anything new. Whilst all the tools in WMDC were available before, it was not as easy to get these tasks to happen. It would normally take many more steps and involve tools outside of ActiveSync.

Conclusion:

As you can see, there are many nice improvements over XP in all of the above sections. There is bound to be many other improvements that I have not found yet. My Windows XP directory (excluding program files) takes up 5.8GB of my hard drive and my Vista directory (excluding program files but with years of excess drivers) is 8.6GB (fresh install) and I don’t think that much of it would be pictures, but rather new features.

It is not time to buy Vista yet for most people unless all you want to run is Office applications, as there is not much software that will run on it, especially for gaming. I am very happy I kept my XP machine connected. I take comfort in the fact that it is a major operating system by Microsoft so I can rest assured that software and hardware companies will embrace Vista and release new products for it. I like to think Vista is too advanced for the software we used in XP and that the software which will work on Vista will utilise all the new features making our computers something very special and enjoyable.

(Update – 10 Days in: Vista is running very well and stable. I have tried to get some of my games up and running in Vista and I have had great success. Please read my article “Vista Gaming: Will your games work under Vista?” for a complete rundown of my experience with gaming in Vista.

I will continue to say that for most people, it is not time to get Vista for gaming yet as many games require a few extra steps to get running, generally being more complicated than simply installing and running. If you are comfortable with computers and updating patches, drivers and doing a few tweaks, You can probably enjoy your gaming experience in Vista now. It won’t be long before all your games will work under Vista. Maybe buy your family a new Vista computer for Christmas.)

I am really excited about exploring these new features and letting you know about them and how to use them as they were meant to be used, or as they can be used. Check back to inspectmygadget.com to see what I come across. For now though if you do get Vista, sit back and enjoy the great Texas Hold ’em Poker which is an Ultimate extra or check out the new effects in the updated solitaire.

I have had Engin VOIP as the main line in my house for a year now. I got married and moved out of home. The new house already had a cable internet connection so I decided to stick with it. Signing up to the Engin VOIP service meant I would not have to rent a phone line for phone or internet services. This seemed like the ideal solution, embracing new technology to save myself money.

This article will explain my experience with the Engin service in Australia and show you the positives and negatives of using VOIP services.

I do not have experience with other VOIP services. All I have used is Engin, other companies may be better or worse. I am based in Australia so this article is relevant to Australians. There is a good chance that in other countries, companies have invested more money into VOIP.

I am using Engin Voice Box Series 1. Other VOIP products may offer a better quality call. Ensure to include the cost of the voice box into your decision to go with VOIP.

Reasons: There are many reasons why I wanted to give Engin a go. It was a risk as it was fairly new but they offered so much more than a regular phone company for the price. I have listed some of them below.

• Extremely cheap local calls
• Extremely cheap national calls
• No land-line cost
• Free extra services such as called ID which regular Tel-cos charge extra for
• New technology, I always like to tinker
• Engin was being advertised on radio and TV
• Cable would provide plenty of bandwidth to allow for voice calls.

Installation: Installation was quick and easy. All I had to do was connect the voice box up to my router and my phone system. I also bought a set of Uniden WDECT phones and placed them around my house so there is cordless phone in each room of my house and attached it to the Engin Box.

I rang Engin with my details and registered myself with the service. The whole process was quick and easy and the next day it was up and running.

The first week was a bit shaky. The phone would continually drop out and the call quality was not great. Each morning I would have to check the phone for a dial tone to ensure I could still receive calls. After the first week, things settled down and the phone would rarely disconnect itself. To reconnect the voice-box again I would have to disconnect and reconnect power to both the router and the voice box.

The Bills: These are great. I pay $9.95 a month to access the service and 10c for each local and national call. Calling mobiles is also cheaper. Our household makes around 30 local/national calls a month, costing us $3. We also make around 10 mobile calls a month which costs us around $10 for 30 minutes of talk time.

All up, that’s around $25 for us monthly. We would have to pay around the $60 mark with a regular Tel-co.

Day to day use: At the start there was a minor noticeable sound delay in many of the phone calls and the call quality was not all that good. I could make sense of what the other person was saying, but it was nowhere near the call quality of a fixed line.

I was not happy with people at the other end saying that the phone line was crap, or saying they heard an echo. I wanted do something about this so I signed up as a Voiper user. This allowed me to play around with the settings inside the voice box. There was a cost to this as I would no longer get the same support offered to regular users. I had used their support prior to this but they were unable to help me get the quality of calls to where I wanted it to be so I felt like I had no support anyway. I was left to my own devices from now on and had to use web forums to learn what to change to get the most out of the system.

I changed the voice codec, testing each one to see what sounded better. I played with a few other settings also but the codec was the main one. The codec is the converter which changes your voice to a digital signal the computer world can understand.

The results were a little better after these changes. The dropouts still occured every so often and my wife and family were getting quite frustrated by it all. After 6 months I was borderline as to if we should get a proper phone line installed. The cost (approximately an extra $40 a month) helped me stick with Engin. This was a very bad time for Engin as calls were dropping out all over the shop.

I continued on with it, trying a different codec every couple of weeks. I don’t think the codec change is what has helped make it better though. I think the company itself has done some upgrades at its end. The phone line is now quite usable and it very rarely drops out. I asked my wife what she thought of it and she said “I suppose it’s alright”.

It is still not quite up to what a standard Tel-co company offers. When I started off using Engin, it was like calling overseas around 20 years ago. Now it is the equivalent to calling overseas 10 years ago.

Conclusion: I am using Engin as the only phone line to and from my house, we can also communicate through our mobile phones. For us, the money saved through using VOIP makes it worth sticking with the service. It is a trade off. The quality isn’t fantastic but it is usable and it should only get better with time.

Running a company and using your VOIP line as your only phone line may lose you customers. If the phone disconnects or isn’t of great quality, the customer may become frustrated and go somewhere else.

If you already have a regular Tel-co land-line, you may want to consider installing VOIP also as the cost of sending a fax through the system is cheap. The cost of calling national is cheap. With many of their voice boxes, you are able to send your current phone line into the box so that you can choose which system you send your calls out on. This is especially useful for calling emergency phone numbers.

If you have a power outage and you use VOIP, you will need to use your mobile phone as VOIP will not work.

I hope that this has given you a worthwhile understanding of what VOIP will be like for you. There is no doubt that VOIP is the future, but currently you will have to decide if the future is ready for you.

Please check out some of the other articles at inspectmygadget.com