Erusal

Summary:
When you are ill, what you require is the care and attention which everyone’s entitled to. If you are critically ill you need the promise that you will obtain the very best treatment, in spite of the cost. Is this what you’ll get?

Critical illness has moved on a lot. There are lots of new plans on the market – some admittedly giving very restricted, but vital, insurance at very realistic costs. Perhaps they should be titled Rest Assured Insurance.

Starting with uncomplicated covers  for instance cash plans, where a small amount of money is paid out when you require physio treatments or a visit to the orthodontist or something along these lines , through to all out fully comprehensive health insurance policies, there’s an  insurance to fit everyone’s needs.

Because the government decided that it was reasonable for the patient to pay for essential expensive drugs for critical illnesses, like cancer, without losing the right to National Health Service treatment for the patient, an easy insurance policy to provide basic National Health Service (NHS)  payments that occur occasionally has come into play. Plus, you can “top-up” up to 5 options for additional cover – one of the options is for a cancer drug. If the National Health Service (NHS) declined any cancer medication at any time on expense grounds, then the insurance would pay for them.

If you have enough money to pay one thousand two hundred pounds per year or even more,  in that case there is the private medical system to deliberate.  Despite the fact that, that amount of money may give the impression that it is ludicrous, when you think, you would have to fork out over 100 pounds to see a doctor privately and the price of a simple operation would be staggering, actually it’s understandable. Treatment when and where you want it and admittance to facilities and specialists without the long waiting lists are the rewards of this scheme.

If private health care interests you, but you’d prefer keep the price as low as possible, there are some things you can do about it. One way is agreeing to an excess on the insurance cover, then the lower-cost treatments and specialists which may come below the excess amount, are funded by you. Leaving the expensive, more serious conditions covered by the insurance company. Likewise you could agree to pay a part of all claims. You may save a considerable amount if you take up one or the other of these choices, whilst still having the ability to sleep easy knowing that it’s a nigh on “skies the limit” situation if you became severely ill.

There’s a company offering a perfectly new idea in medical care. It sounds a a little bit convoluted but it’s not especially – and it would seem to be a good idea. You are offered the pick of deciding to pay up to 1/2 of any claim that you make. Ten per cent is the bottom rate. On the demonstration made available, a 42 year old non-smoker would would need to pay just below £100 per month for full cover. Paying 10 per cent of the claim would take this down by seventeen pounds, while paying half would mean paying a price of around £42.
life assurance , concisely, offers a one off lump sum should a serious illness be diagnosed. This is generally between ninety thousand pounds and 260,000 pounds It may seem an awful lot of money remember the terrifically high cost of health care that can be involved. Not all critical illness insurance companies cover all types of cancer, for example, so inspect the clauses very carefully and make certain you fully comprehend any exclusions and limitations.

Prior illnesses won’t be covered by any critical illness policies and you must be utterly honest and straightforward when giving information about your health record. Should a claim be made, the first thing the insurance company will do is to contact your doctor and ask for your medical records and if they find there’s something you have not made known, whether or not pertinent to your current serious illness, it is quite likely they will reject your claim.

wherethegoodstuffis.net

Having been amongst the first to purchase the Dell 910 Mini I wanted to share my experience with others that might be thinking about acquiring this item or one of the other sub-notebook or ‘netbooks’ as they have become known. I manage a web design agency and I’ve been contemplating the idea of acquiring myself a more modern laptop as my old Dell Inspiron from 2003 is as heavy as a brick.

Shortly after having retired the old Dell to my girlfriends house (I couldn’t face lugging it back and forwards any longer so it just lives there now, I might well do the same with myself one of these days soon!) it stopped charging and wouldn’t run from the mains, so eventually when I gave it to my tech to repair he found out that it was one of the known faulty models, the 5150 which developed a problem with the motherboard overheating after prolonged use, this I found out about 2 years after they stopped replacing them as part of a class action lawsuit, shame I’m two years too late to get it replaced for free!

Ah well what’s 150 quid for a factory refurbished Motherboard off ebay, compared with years of loyal service in spite of being dropped a couple of times, spat on repeatedly, eaten over and all manner of other not recommended usage styles! I even used to have it hooked up to my TV via the onboard S-VHS port and watch films on it, so it has seen some action, oh yes!Not that I download movies off the internet you understand of course, oh no that would just be wrong, and illegal and I wouldn’t want to risk getting my broadband disconnected!

However, this was all instigated by my step dad who just took delivery of top of the range Toshiba Portege at around £1,200, but he’s at that time in life where 1,200 quid is affordable, where as I’m still in financial recovery from my last divorce (yes there was more than one!)! So I happened across an ad for the Dell Inspiron 910 Mini on the Dell website whilst looking at specs of laptops for a customer, and there it was £299 inc VAT and delivery. What a bargain I thought! (If you are reading this three years after I wrote it and they are now giving them away free on the front of Corn Flake packets then I will be even more gutted, or maybe I’ll just get one for all the family!)

Anyway there I was credit card at the ready, wrist twitching ready to buy, but hang on I thought, why am I buying this, do I really need it? No, I don’t NEED it I just WANT ONE ! So then some sensibility came over me and I put my credit card away, feeling all pleased with myself at having managed to resist an impulse purchase!

However, the next day my step Dad needs me to investigate his new Toshiba because he can’t get the printer to work and can’t get it to see the other computers that are on our network (this job for me, comes with the territory!) So I have to genuinely work on this ultra lightweight new laptop, wow I’m amazed at how light it is, especially compared to my old Dell 5150 which weighs in at about the same weight as two breeze blocks! I wish I had cash spare to invest in one of these I thought! I noticed he didn’t have my recommended security software installed though.I installed my recommended computer security software: Avast Anti Virus and Spybot Search & Destroy, these two packages make up my standard protection for all my PC’s, and they’re free for home use.

The following day I had to go to a customers and as the appointement was first thing in the morning I went straight from my girlfriends house and took the old 5150 with me (which gives me a great excuse to call in on my way back and drop it off, coincidentally around about lunchtime when there might be the chance of a ham, cheese and salad sandwich on the go! Yum, she is soooo good to me!) So anyway, I about put my back out trying to put this incredibly heavy laptop in the car passenger foot well whilst sitting in the drivers’ seat! So having experienced the new lightweight machines first hand, and realised I do have a genuine NEED for the new Dell Inspiron mini after all, weighing in at around 1kg, you know I planned to get that credit card out again as soon as I was able!

So as I had a management meeting that afternoon I informed my Finance Manager I would be ordering one and that was that. It was Friday October 3rd when I placed the order on the Dell website, and on the 8th I got back from a client meeting to find a small cardboard box on my desk with the Dell log on the side, I thought it couldn’t possibly be the new mini as the confirmation email I got said it would arrive on or around the 20th October, but sure enough it really had arrived! Just a 5 day turn around, wow!

So I’m like a kid in a sweet shop thinking “best day ever” (See Heroes Season 3), I was ecstatic and carefully unpacked it, tossing instructions and disks to one side, “read those later” I thought. I got it out and started setting it up straight away, you know remove McAfee Security Centre and all the other junk software these things come with these days.

As it has an integrated web cam I also downloaded Windows Live Messenger and had a quick video call with my fiancée whilst she was doing her ironing, fantastic!So next I Googled ‘mobile broadband suppliers’ and toyed with ordering the USB dongle from Three, as their 5GB monthly allowance is only 15 quid a month so the best looking deal, providing those coverage stories you hear about Three Mobile are not really true! (Update: Yes the coverage is lousy in all the areas I want to use it, even at my desk I have to connect the dongle to a USB cable and hang it from my roof to get 1 bar signal strength, buy another brand!)

Anyway, it was soon time to go and get my daughter from school so I thought yeah I’ll take it with me and even though I don’t have the mobile broadband USB Modem yet I can continue configuring it in car park if I’m early. I was early, so I turned it on, it said:

Windows could not start because of an error in the software.

Please report this problem as :

load needed DLLs for kernel.

Please contact your support person to report this problem

As we say in England from the popular Catherine Tate sketch “Computer says no…”

Ah dear, it was great fun whilst it lasted, all of about 2 and a half minutes!Then followed a two and a half hour telethon with Dell support in India Apparently they were so quick to ship the laptop to me that my service tag isn’t on their system yet.

I couldn’t understand why they simply refused to send me a replacement until they could look the service tag up! I was so annoyed with them, you could maybe understand if it was something complicated, for example server virtualization but it’s just brand new Dell 910 mini laptop which won’t boot up, ridiculous!)

They suggested I called back in 24-48 hours, well I explained to them exactly what I thought of their suggestion as I’m sure you can image, but to no avail. I did indeed have to call back today and they have agreed to send me a replacement unit as it is within 7 days of delivery.

I hope the replacement arrives as quickly as the original unit did…

So conclusion? Apart from the fact it doesn’t work (a faulty drive in my opinion) and for the life of me I can’t get it to boot from an external drive or USB key (it doesn’t have a CD or DVD drive you know) it feels really solid, looks lovely, and is nice to handle (sounds a bit like the ideal partner to an i-phone 2.0 doesn’t it!).

Like most reviewers have stated , the keys are small (but blackberry users manage and they are larger than those keys) and the right shift key is tiny and means you can’t type an @ in the usual fashion. But the screen is nice, 3 USB slots, a monitor connector, Ethernet and earphones and mic connectors although it has both speakers and mic internally so you can Live Messenger without having to plug anything in.

On the whole, I would recommend it, providing you get one that isn’t broken ! I am also yet to try it with LogMeIn which is my preferred way of dealing with how to access emails, lots of passwords, specialist software and all that kind of thing when you are out and about. Possibly the screen is going to be too small to be able to work with for extended periods of time, but I’ll let you know when the replacement arrives and I have had chance to give it a proper testing, assuming that one doesn’t break on me as soon as I start urm ‘configuring’ it!

Further Update: So I have had the Dell Mini for about erm, wow nearly 12 months! It would never work with LogMeIn over the Three dongle. To be fair 3 were very helpful, until we took the dongle out and used it in another one of my computers and were able to connect on LogMeIn without any problems, at this point they referred me to Dell, at which point I lost interest!

It is all to do with one of the browser settings, not remembering itself when you select the check box and hit OK. I can’t remember which one it was now, and maybe ie 8 will have fixed the problem or it might work on Mozilla browser instead, I just never got round to trying to sort it out again and tend to use the Mini more now to read the news in bed with my cup of tea in the morning.It’s just so convenient being so small, and another great feature is it’s near instant turn on. If you just shut the lid it goes into standby, open the lid and it comes back on again within seconds.

It is too small to use for really extended periods but it is great for checking your email when you’re out and about, or for a quick impulse surf when you’re watching tv and you want to remind yourself what other films that actor or actress was in for example!I’ve yet to connect it to one of my external lcd monitors but I guess it would work just as well as any other pc then.

It’s a great little machine though and also works quite well down the pub, because I can even fit it in the pocket of my big coat, and that is proper cool, except it doesn’t like beer puddles much so I tend to avoid taking it most of the time, unless I know I’m going to need to log on, but then the pub has got a sexy new Mac which is already covered in beer so I prefer to use that (any excuse to get behind the bar really!)

In summary though it has not had any hardware reliability issues since the initial replacement was received. On the whole I have found that Dell kit tends to be pretty reliable anyway, especially when you are dealing with the more business based items whereas this is obviously more consumer focussed. With a Dell or most new PC’s if they are going to breakdown they will usually do so within the first six months of use and generally after that they will keep going until they reach their recommended service intervals such as changing the disks after a couple of years and that kind of thing.

It should be made clear though that these mini Dell laptops/netbooks, call them what you will, do not having a traditional hard disk drive inside them. A normal hard drive has a disk inside it that physically spins round and a ‘head’ which moves backwards and forwards over the sectors quite like the relationship between the stylus and the tracks on an old fashion vinyl record(which being 40 next year I do remember from my childhood)!

The storage within the Dell mini, and other netbooks too I should image, are solid state, that is to say they are rather like USB flash drives or memory keys. In fact I think from a picture I saw they look more like RAM memory chips all joined together than a single physical device. The advantage of using solid state memory over traditional hard drives is that they use less power, they are not as heavy and they are quieter.

My Dell Mini is blissfully quiet in comparison to any of my other computers, desktops or laptops. Although if you are super-sensitive to noise like I am then you can notice a very slight hum or whine when you request a program that requires it to access the hard drive. Most people probably won’t notice this but if you are familiar with the faint hum from your mobile phone charger or other devices of that ilk that transform power from one state to another then you might know what I am talking about. It certainly isn’t a problem though, although the power adapter for the machine itself does make some odd noises if you listen to it closely. It is similar to a mobile phone charger though, not like a traditional laptop power adapter, and this makes the whole thing much more portable.

My favourite aspect of this machine is that in some it elicits the same response as having a small puppy or kitten out and about with you, especially down the pub where if you get it out to a bunch of girls you can hear the ooh and ahhh’s of girls who think something is cute! That is priceless!

If you have a pond then chances are you currently understand exactly what an aquatic plant is. These hide either at the very bottom of the pond, sneak in upon the banks of the water, or sit happily on the surface. a few of the more well known plants are called Hydrilla, Water Hyacinth, and finally Milfoil Weevil Naturally there isn’t really, truly anything bad about such plant life, since of course, a few can help increase the oxygen levels within the water. But sometimes you may discover, that this submerged growth can become an annoyance.

Let’s say that you have a family, that is a thing which many individuals have, as raising a family is a popular pastime, then odds are your family likes swimming or even boating on your pond. Swimming, boating, fishing, are all extremely fun things to perform within the water, that is if you can afford a pond adequate for all that, but, water life might stop you from having such enjoyment, whether you realize this right now or not. Truthfully, if the plant life in your water grows past your control, then you’ll have somewhat of a mess on your hands. There’s a chance that the engine in your motorboat will be clogged by these plants, fishing would end in pulling up plant life situated at the bottom, and swimming would be out of the question since the pond will appear just plain nasty covered in both seaweed as well as lily pads.

So by what method do you prevent this from occurring? There are many methods, and naturally it is best that you talk to an expert, and even more important, the laws of your state before doing anything extreme. In spite of any restrictions that you may encounter though, there are ways to save that much loved backyard body of water.

Mechanical – Aquatic Weed Harveters is a machine that is used throught the US for aquatic weed control

Herbicides – There are of course, chemical compounds which you could utilize to reduce the plant life both beneath the water, and atop the water. They’re called herbicides, and two of the more famous ones will have copper or fluoride. Remember that a few of these herbicides, especially those variants that have copper, may be harmful for fish. It is additionally suggested to keep the family away from the water while you’re administering these chemicals.

Topography – If you build the pond on a steep hill, you will halt the growth of some plant life, as by having a steep incline, the plants won’t be able to take root. Of course, a aggressive incline indicates there’s no room for error when swimming, therefore it’s suggested for you to keep life preservers on hand, in addition to having the family use life jackets in the water.

Shading – A more interesting technique, will be to lay plastic on top of the pond, and thus reducing the volume of sunlight which reaches the aquatic plants.

Pond Lining – An approach which not many think of, is lining the bottom of their pond with plastic, making it that the aquatic plants are unable to flourish. If you have a big pond, this may be rather impractical due to the huge volume of plastic you require. But if it is just a tiny pond then you will probably have no problem doing this.

Barring aquatic growth is completely plausible, with enough research, and some advice from the professionals or other pond proprietors, you will discover the best method to render the pond enjoyable for your whole household.

From time to time, we receive calls from people we do not really know. It might be that the person calling at the other end is playing a prank and make several more calls, we want to put a stop to it. Or maybe the call came from a long lost pal or a kin and we want to keep in connection with. For these causes, it is essential to acquire more info about the cell phone number and what can assist you with it is the reverse phone lookup.

A reverse cell phone look up basically traces the address and the name of the caller. Doing this can be very helpful especially if you want to uncover about people who keep making prank calls, or the home address of an friend or maybe that somebody who your boyfriend or girlfriend talks with secretly.

In spite being helpful, you still ought to search for a invert cell phone lookup support that is best for you before you perform a search. If you can search online, you’ll come across free reverse cell phone search directories.

Nevertheless, these sites are worthless save for when you’re searching for a landline number. They cannot provide you with results on cell phone number searches as well as other unlisted numbers. When you employ free reverse cell phone lookup services, you have high odds of not finding what you are hunting for.

So when you are determined about finding out anonymous prank calls or calls from friends you’ve lost contact with, go for paid services that can give you appropriate cell phone number directories. Free reverse cell phone lookup effortlessly gives out landline numbers are they are easy to gather and arrange while mobile numbers has to be brought together manually and it would really cost service providers to give us the information we require. But we should also mull over the thought that not all service providers can give us the standard service we want. We should make the effort at checking their service feedback rate and make sure that they will work for our reverse cell phone lookup service.