I read an article in a TV forum earlier this week that Comcast was adding some new High Definition channels to their lineup. Sure enough when I got home tonight and checked the new channels were there. They are Disney HD, ABC Family HD, TLC HD, AMC HD, Science Channel HD, The Movie Channel HD and Showtime 2 HD. My total HD lineup is now:
PBS
CBS
ABC
NBC
WMUR
National Geographic
Discovery Channel
Fox
MTV
TBS
HGTV
TNT
USA
A & E
WSBK
HD Theater
CNN
Weatherscan
Golf / Versus
ESPN
ESPN2
NESN
Comcast Sports Network New England
NFLHD
Food Network
WLVI
Sci Fi
Animal Planet
Cinemax
HBO
History Channel
Starz
Showtime
MOJO
Disney
ABC Family
TLC
AMC
Science Channel
The Movie Channel
Showtime 2
That brings the total number of available HD channels in my area to 41. The Movie Channel and Showtime 2 are subscription only and I do not subscribe to those channels but I did see them in the guide. Also Disney and ABC Family did not appear to be broadcasting HD Programs or they weren't when I looked earlier. This seems to be the case when many of the HD channels first go on-line. They start with just a couple programs in HD and slowly add programming over the months.
I don't understand why Comcast doesn't make an announcement when adding new channels. It seems you either have to find them accidentally while flipping through the channels or read TV and HD forums. A simple email to their HD customers would be nice. But I am always happy to see them add new channels. I don't regularly watch any of the new channels but it is great the Comcast is constantly adding to their HD lineup.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Thursday, July 3, 2008
DCT700
Over the past few months we have been having some problems with the TV in our bedroom. Intermittently the signal was dropping and it wasn't the normal pixelization that you sometimes see on the digital boxes. This isn't my High Def TV where I have the DVR installed. It is just a basic 27" Panasonic tube that I have owned for over 10 years. I was really hoping it was the TV that was going as I would love to get an LCD for the bedroom but I just couldn't justify it if the TV was still working fine.
So I figured the problem was most likely with the box so I popped over to the local Comcast office to get a replacement box. I was a little surprised when the tech brought out one of these:
It is another Motorola box: model number DCT700. What surprised me about it is the size. It is 5-1/2 inches wide 6-1/2 inches long and under 2 inches high. The specs say that it has the same features as the larger basic digital boxes. The obvious difference is there is no readout on the front for channel or time which has taken us a little getting used to as we used our cable box as a clock in the morning. I also noticed that the box emits a high frequency buzz. I can hear it but my wife cannot so maybe it is just me.Overall though I am pretty happy with it. The size allows us to save some space on the shelf and I am not having the signal dropping problems that I was having with the old box. So I guess I am stuck with my 27" tube for a few more years.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Comcast Drops Pivot
I got a letter in the mail a couple weeks ago that Comcast will be discontinuing the Pivot / Sprint Cell phone plan effective June 25, 2008.
I was a bit disappointed with this news as one of the reasons I signed up with the service was to bundle my cell phone service with my cable bill. One less bill was really appealing, but the main reason I signed up was the price was about $10 cheaper per month that what I was paying with Verizon.
Current Pivot customers have the choice to continue their service with Sprint for the same price or drop the service without incurring any early termination fees. As an extra incentive to stay with Sprint they are offering one month of free service if you do stay with them.
I did a little research on the current cost and features of plans in my area (New England) and decided to stick with Sprint. For the basic family plan that I am using Verizon appears to be about $10 more than Sprint. Cingular is the same price but does offer rollover minutes but friends that have the service in my area report spotty service. The free month helps and I am not in any rush to buy new cell phones after having my current phones for 6 months.
So overall I am not real happy with the switch but based on the issues I had with Pivot billing and my conversations with billing support I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
I was a bit disappointed with this news as one of the reasons I signed up with the service was to bundle my cell phone service with my cable bill. One less bill was really appealing, but the main reason I signed up was the price was about $10 cheaper per month that what I was paying with Verizon.
Current Pivot customers have the choice to continue their service with Sprint for the same price or drop the service without incurring any early termination fees. As an extra incentive to stay with Sprint they are offering one month of free service if you do stay with them.
I did a little research on the current cost and features of plans in my area (New England) and decided to stick with Sprint. For the basic family plan that I am using Verizon appears to be about $10 more than Sprint. Cingular is the same price but does offer rollover minutes but friends that have the service in my area report spotty service. The free month helps and I am not in any rush to buy new cell phones after having my current phones for 6 months.
So overall I am not real happy with the switch but based on the issues I had with Pivot billing and my conversations with billing support I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Free McAfee Anti Virus
Many people may not be aware that if you you use Comcast for your Internet they give you McAfee Security Suite for free. Buying off the shelf will cost you $120. Buying Anti virus software every couple years can be pretty expensive and then you have to keep renewing in order to get the latest virus definitions. This is a pretty nice feature for Comcast to offer although it probably saves them money in the long run as I assume they get less calls from people whose Internet has stopped working because they got a virus.
Not sure exactly what the licensing rules are if you own multiple PCs but I was able to install the software on my desktop and laptop without an issue.
As far as how good McAfee is compared to other antivirus software I am not sure that there is a consensus. I did a quick google search for "best antivirus software" and came up with numerous best of lists. Most had Mcafee on their lists none at the top though, every list had their own idea of what was the best. From my personal experience I have also used Norton, which seemed to slow my PC down quite a bit. It also installed some software that I was never able to uninstall.
In the two years that I have been using McAfee I haven't had any problems. For the price it really can't be beat.
Not sure exactly what the licensing rules are if you own multiple PCs but I was able to install the software on my desktop and laptop without an issue.
As far as how good McAfee is compared to other antivirus software I am not sure that there is a consensus. I did a quick google search for "best antivirus software" and came up with numerous best of lists. Most had Mcafee on their lists none at the top though, every list had their own idea of what was the best. From my personal experience I have also used Norton, which seemed to slow my PC down quite a bit. It also installed some software that I was never able to uninstall.
In the two years that I have been using McAfee I haven't had any problems. For the price it really can't be beat.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Comcast HDTV Service
I first signed up for Comcast's High Definition service back in 2002. I can remember my first few months with the new HD box the reception was really bad. The picture would get really pixelated or would just go black once in a while. This lasted for a few months until it slowly disappeared. I assumed they were just working out the kinks, that is the price you pay for being an early adopter. When the picture did come in and I had people over they were really blown away by the picture. This was back when not too many people had HD so it was still pretty new for most people. Back then I think I only had 3 or 4 channels. One of the channels would only broadcast scenes of flowers blowing in the breeze. Nice channel to show people what HD is all about but a pretty useless channel otherwise. I think they have done away with that channel or at least have some better programming now, it might have been the PBS channel.
Over the years Comcast has done a pretty good job of adding a few new channels a year. In my area (New England) there are 35 available HD channels. I currently get 30 based on the package I subscribe to. I think it is a pretty good deal based on what you pay. Comcast has raised the price of their HD package over the years but I think only by a few dollars. I think they are currently charging $8.99 for the service. These are the Channels available in my area:
Over the years Comcast has done a pretty good job of adding a few new channels a year. In my area (New England) there are 35 available HD channels. I currently get 30 based on the package I subscribe to. I think it is a pretty good deal based on what you pay. Comcast has raised the price of their HD package over the years but I think only by a few dollars. I think they are currently charging $8.99 for the service. These are the Channels available in my area:
- PBS
- CBS
- ABC
- NBC
- WMUR
- National Geographic
- Discovery Channel
- Fox
- MTV
- TBS
- HGTV
- TNT
- USA
- A & E
- WSBK
- HD Theater
- CNN
- Weatherscan
- Golf / Versus
- ESPN
- ESPN2
- NESN
- Comcast Sports Network New England
- NFLHD
- Food Network
- WLVI
- Sci Fi
- Animal Planet
- Cinemax
- HBO
- History Channel
- Starz
- Showtime
- INHD
Comcast also makes much of their High Definition content available OnDemand thus their claim they offer the most hours of HD programming. Note that they don't say the most channels just the most programming as they are including all of their On demand stuff. Direct TV appears to have the most channels at over 90 according to their website. Though most of the channels I wouldn't have much interest in anyway. The other option in my area is Verizon FIOS which appears to have around 25 HD channels. Overall I am pretty happy with the amount I pay for the programs I get from Comcast. As long as Comcast stays competitive price-wise and keeps adding new channels every year I don't see myself switching to Verizon or Satellite anytime soon.
Monday, February 11, 2008
TIVO on Mororola motorola dch3416
This weekend I had a friend over who also recently had Comcast TIVO installed. We were comparing our experiences, we have had similar experiences and basically came to the conclusion that the box is still pretty buggy but that is the price we pay for being early adopters.
Then he noticed my cable box and noted that it was different than his, he still has the old Motorola DCT6412. I had assumed everyone who was getting TIVO through Comcast was getting a new box but apparently this is not so. So I asked my wife about the install as I was at work when it was installed. My wife's reply was "Oh yeah, they tried to get it going on the old box but it wasn't working so they brought this one in". So it looks like if they can't get TIVO working on your existing box they just install it on the motorola dch3416. For those interested the motorola dch3416 looks like this
Then he noticed my cable box and noted that it was different than his, he still has the old Motorola DCT6412. I had assumed everyone who was getting TIVO through Comcast was getting a new box but apparently this is not so. So I asked my wife about the install as I was at work when it was installed. My wife's reply was "Oh yeah, they tried to get it going on the old box but it wasn't working so they brought this one in". So it looks like if they can't get TIVO working on your existing box they just install it on the motorola dch3416. For those interested the motorola dch3416 looks like this
In my opinion it is a better looking box than the DCT6412. You can find the specs on the box here. I didn't really have time to compare all of the differences between the DCT6412 and the DCH3416 but one spec did stand out to me. The DCT6412 has a 120GB hard drive and the DCH3416 has a 160GB hard drive so at the very least I shoud have a bit more recording capacity. Intersted to see what model other TIVO users have been given
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Comcast Personal Web Pages
I have have been using Comcast's Personal Web Page service for around 3 years now. Initially I used it for hosting some personal family albums and other hobby websites. When I first started using PWP Comcast gave you 25 megabyres of space per accound and since Comcast allows you to have 5 accounts that is over 100 megabytes of space which was plenty for what I was using it for. They also offered some really basic web page builder tools and ftp tools. The tools weren't really that great but I wasn't really bothered by that as I have my own HTML editor and FTP tool.
In the summer of 2007 Comcast announced that they were upgrading their Personal Web Page service and giving users a gigabyte of space and some additional features like blogging. At the time I was considering turning one of my webpages into a blog so I held off and waited until the upgrade happened.
Before the upgrade happened Comcast sent me an email informing me that my webpage would be inaccessable between 12am and 7am. Unfortunately after the upgrade access to my webpages were intermittenet at best for weeks. For a few days I also could not use my 3rd party FTP tools to upload any files to my account. They also changed the shortcut you were able to use to access webpages. You used to be able to access a webpage bu using the url :
home.comcast.net/~username
or
username.home.comcast.net
After the upgrade typing in the url username.home.comcast.net would redirect to username.home.comcast.net/~username on most browsers but I was told by some people that used aol that they were no longer able to access my webpage, I assume because AOL was preventing a redirect.
I also looked briefly at the new blogging software they provided and it was extremely basic. Not even a tenth of the features that free blogs like blogspot provide. Another issue I has was all of the entries in my guestbook disspapeared. Luckily I somehow found a way to aceess them and was able to save them but haven't been able to get back into them since.
Calling Comcast support didn't seem to help as most of the techs aren't familiar with PWP and are only able to tell you if they are up or down. The only area that I was able to find any information was in the comcast help forums. There were may people there posting with problem some much worse than the problems I was having. But at least it was a place to go to see that I wasn't the only one having issues. Seems like Comcast may have contracted the upgrade out and is was messed up royally. There are still to this day people posting messages in the forum that have been having issues since the upgrade. Some pretty unhappy people in there.
I ended up moving some of my webpages off comcast PWP and onto blogspot and hadn't looked back at the features until recently when I noticed that the new features like blogging were no longer available and the feature set had rolled back to the way it was before the upgrade. I am not sure if this is something affecting just my account or if it was everyone. I also noticed recently that the urls for accessing pages is intermittently changing. Sometimes username.home.comcast.net works, sometimes it doesn't. The new result of this is the pictuures that I have hosted on comcast are sometimes unavailable.
In summary I think Comcast PWP are good for basic web pages that only a few people will be accessing. If you are concerened about downtime don't use them. There are plenty of free blogs or cheap webhosting products that you can get if you are hosting professional websites that you plan to make money off or run a business from. Interested in hearing what others experiences have been with Comcast PWP.
In the summer of 2007 Comcast announced that they were upgrading their Personal Web Page service and giving users a gigabyte of space and some additional features like blogging. At the time I was considering turning one of my webpages into a blog so I held off and waited until the upgrade happened.
Before the upgrade happened Comcast sent me an email informing me that my webpage would be inaccessable between 12am and 7am. Unfortunately after the upgrade access to my webpages were intermittenet at best for weeks. For a few days I also could not use my 3rd party FTP tools to upload any files to my account. They also changed the shortcut you were able to use to access webpages. You used to be able to access a webpage bu using the url :
home.comcast.net/~username
or
username.home.comcast.net
After the upgrade typing in the url username.home.comcast.net would redirect to username.home.comcast.net/~username on most browsers but I was told by some people that used aol that they were no longer able to access my webpage, I assume because AOL was preventing a redirect.
I also looked briefly at the new blogging software they provided and it was extremely basic. Not even a tenth of the features that free blogs like blogspot provide. Another issue I has was all of the entries in my guestbook disspapeared. Luckily I somehow found a way to aceess them and was able to save them but haven't been able to get back into them since.
Calling Comcast support didn't seem to help as most of the techs aren't familiar with PWP and are only able to tell you if they are up or down. The only area that I was able to find any information was in the comcast help forums. There were may people there posting with problem some much worse than the problems I was having. But at least it was a place to go to see that I wasn't the only one having issues. Seems like Comcast may have contracted the upgrade out and is was messed up royally. There are still to this day people posting messages in the forum that have been having issues since the upgrade. Some pretty unhappy people in there.
I ended up moving some of my webpages off comcast PWP and onto blogspot and hadn't looked back at the features until recently when I noticed that the new features like blogging were no longer available and the feature set had rolled back to the way it was before the upgrade. I am not sure if this is something affecting just my account or if it was everyone. I also noticed recently that the urls for accessing pages is intermittently changing. Sometimes username.home.comcast.net works, sometimes it doesn't. The new result of this is the pictuures that I have hosted on comcast are sometimes unavailable.
In summary I think Comcast PWP are good for basic web pages that only a few people will be accessing. If you are concerened about downtime don't use them. There are plenty of free blogs or cheap webhosting products that you can get if you are hosting professional websites that you plan to make money off or run a business from. Interested in hearing what others experiences have been with Comcast PWP.
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