Broadband is down

Broadband has failed us, again. I'm dialled out using Free-Net, but they seem to be a bit unreliable. Recommendations for a free-apart-from-national-call-charges ISP in the UK who don't require me to register or anything before I can start using them gratefully received!

More Windows madness

I have to get the cable modem failing under Windows before I can call support about it. My efforts to do this are hampered by Windows failing in new and interesting ways.

This time, it has lost the CD-ROM drive. I've looked in the Device Manager, and it can't see anything hanging off the secondary IDE. I've tried disabling and re-enabling it, to no effect. Linux can still see and use the drive just fine, so it's not a hardware problem. Without the CD-ROM drive, I can't make it do very much...

Does anyone have any idea what might cause a problem like this, or what I can do to fix it? Or am I stuck with finally buying a backup device and re-installing Windows?