Darrel

No, not load balancing- fall back. I've had very, very poor luck with under-$500 load balancing routers, plus the wifi/router combo. The above does the job well since ToT is fast but flaky, when it drops off it picks up 3G automatically.

Fall-back wasn't quite what he was after, I think. To me it seemed that he wanted extra bandwidth and redundancy. His DSL speed will depend on where his house is also.

I've used cheapish load balancing routers (or sometimes modem/routers) very effectively in areas where DSL speed is low and have coupled two DSL lines together to double the speed and provide redundancy. I always use them with ethernet DSL modems though, and wifi access points dotted around the houses (which were fully cabled for ethernet). The entire telephone systems were also IP based, along with the alarm system and the entertainment system (Sonos). It all worked very well and can be easily managed from a distance (as long as you remember which device has which IP address!).

If you don't want to pay 200,000 baht then go out and find something cheaper.

Then, when your website doesn't work as you wanted it, go out and spend 200,000 baht to get it done right.

Or, just find someone who will do a good site for less. There are plenty of decent people around who do a good job, work fast and dont think that they deserve to be paid 100s of USD per hour just because they have designer stubble and wear brand-name jeans.

I think that the OP either doesn't know what is involved with making a web page or wants a crappy site. The people that use dreamweaver or templates will not get the heavy traffic that a well designed and professional layout will give. Also if there is coding that needs to be done it can be quite a pain.

What on earth does using Dreamweaver or templates have to do with trafic? Trafic is dictated by the content and relevance of site. How long people stay and what they do once they have got there will depend on the attractiveness, ease of navigation and relevance of the site. And Dreamweaver and/or templates can both provide a nice attractive site based on good code. The relevance of site can never be changed by either. Dreamweaver and templates are in no way mutually inclusive or exclusive anyway: I use DW all the time but never use DW templates from elsewhere. Internal DW templates are great though, and save a huge amount of time.

I recoded a sigificant number of Joomla and Virtuemart php modules for one site that I inherited and that is a pain, but that was for a big online shop with 2000 lines of stock, all made to order and with multiple special ordering requirements. I also had to significantly modify the layout and function of the Virtuemart and Joomla templates (again inherited). DW handled that nicely also and the end result is very attractive and functional.

This small hotel site wth booking page sounds pretty simple by comparison (though admittedly we dont know to what extent the OP wants the entire booking and reservation procedure to be automated), and to spend 200,000B (unless he really is getting a 100% automated reservation, booking and billing system) seems completely over the top.

I have about 90 apps on it. It may sound a lot but it really isn't, I've already gone through my apps several times to see if there was anything I could delete. Everything that can be moved to SD has been moved.

90 is quite a lot. I have about 30 installed and my internal memory shows 218Mb total with 107Mb free.

You can see how much memory your individual apps are using from the application manager and this will also show what proportion of the memory is on the card or on the phone. Once you have moved an app to the card there isnt much else you can do and I dont see how flashing another ROM is going to change things much. I suspect that you just have one or two apps that are not using the memory effectively. Perhaps they are storing some data on the phone?

Flashing a custom ROM is a long and complicated process, with back-up and restoration of data/apps taking the most amount of time.

Maybe this depends on your phone. Flashing my Blade is a doddle. Took me about 30 minutes from beginning to end for the first flash using just 4 bits of free software. Subsequent flashes now take about 5 minutes and require only a few clicks. I'm running 2.3 vey nicely at the moment.

Yes, you can damage your phone if you get it wrong but you have to be a bit of a prat (or very unlucky) to get it wrong on a Blade. YMMV

http://www.globalpropertyguide.com/

Fascinating. I see that prices in Europe are all around the 4% that I mentioned, yet many "cheap" countries like those in SEAsia, Latin America, etc. are significantly higher. Presumably this is related to the types of unit being included in the calculations, and the type of person renting them. Otherwise they make little sense.

Either way it will be a cold day in hell before I pay 6, 7, 8% of a property's value in rent.

Those who are suffering low ROIs are the ones who bought their condo units at peak prices of Bt75k/sqm or more from early 2007 till the present.

As I mentioned previously ROI based on the purchase price is not a valid way of calculating rent. It is only a valid way of calculating ROI. Rent should be calculated as a percentage of the current property value.

Maybe the landlord bought a condo at a firesale for a pittance, or bought it while on yaba and paid 10 times what its worth. Neither has the slightest relevance to the rental value.

And in fact if you really want to calculate ROI you need to take into account the actual value today of the property minus the purchase price, and indeed the relative value of the currency in which the funds were sourced. Few do, it seems.

You are not using the right link.

Use this one. Or access it from the main ktb homepage.

The domain of the link you posted (ktb.co.th) is owned by that bank, so it is not a scam. Just the wrong page.

I opened my Bangkok Bank Account in 1998, I received only the pin number for my card by post,

My PIN from Kbank came by SMS and I have never had any posted document from them. I gave a hotel address when opening the account, which they copied from the hotel calling card. I'm not aware that they post anything at all, ever, except perhaps if your account is about to be closed due to lack of use. And even then it seems that they deduct a small yearly fee for ages until there is only a few baht left before closing it.

I think even a total meltdown is not a serious thing for the USA if it blows directly there. For Japan, yes.

The radiation from Tchernobyl was carried many thousands of km across Europe, though apparently not all countries that it passed over used the same maps. At the time various governments implemented controls about milk production and meat production in areas of signficant rainfall (though not always the governments of the countries in which the rainfall occurred).

Governments are not known for doing such things unless it is really necessary. In fact they generally do far less than they should. In the case of air-borne radioactive contamination they would surely try and play it down as only mass evacuation could be of any real use. And what government wants mass evacuation to worry about? And where do you send the population of an entire country/continent anyway?

A problem with the power supply wouldn't be out of the question.

Indeed, and it could also be memory, processor, motherboard. To test any of those is not a minor job though.

Removing the USB devices is a simple quick and free test that should be tried before anything else. Especially as the OP said he has been adding things recently.

" I would prefer software solutions or operating system tweaks. But hardware solutions are also welcome."

Forget software solutions if you are using more than one computer. They are a total waste of time, money and effort. Especially if you have Apples.

Get a load-balancing router. Simple. Cheap. Effective. Programmable. The devices shown in the above links do not appear to be load-balancing routers though, at least based on the brief look that I gave to them, and if so would not be suitable.

For this to work your CAT wireless connection would also need to be on ethernet rather than USB.

"one company quoted me over 200,000 baht"

5000Euros? Silly prices. Even in Europe it wouldn't cost that. Divide by 3 or 4, maybe.

But you're not alone in being ripped-off here. I came across a local business that paid getting on for double what I would have charged to do a site, and it took 9 months to deliver instead of the 3 or 4 weeks it would have taken me. And that was also a fairly simple site with some internal database search functions and an open-source CMS. And it included no SEO or hosting.

I suppose they need to charge so much to be able to afford the over-priced condos!

you mean you would not pay half of 30,000 rent for a 5m unit? are you serious? you would only pay 15,000? you obviously have no idea

Precisely. I would expect to pay about 4% rent for a decent place in Europe and I see no reason at all why I should pay more than that here.

If someone can explain to me what is so wonderful about here that makes rental property worth such a high return I would like to hear about it. The very fact that so many places are empty simply proves that they just arent worth it.

I'm afraid that these magically high returns are just an example of the all-pervading Thai notion of "if it doesnt sell put the price up".

The first shop I ever saw offering fresh off the grill crumpets was in Seattle. Do they have them in the UK or Australia?

Crumpets are one of the world's great culinary inventions. I adore them. Never seen them here.

They are widely available in packs of 4, 8, 12 in UK supermarkets but I've never seen a crumpet shop as such. I've made them myself often but even then I prefer them cooked, cooled and then toasted.

I wonder if crumpets taste the same in the US as in the UK? Many things dont, even if they have the same name.

The fallout from Tchernobyl passed over where I was living at the time. I suspect that far more people died from cancer in the years that followed than would have done had the accident not occurred.

That said, for the time being the Japan radiation (and there isnt that much of it, so far ) is currently being carried towards the US mainland, not here. The Americans are welcome to it.

If the level increases and the wind carries it this way I may well make that an excuse to pop back to Europe for a prolonged Songkran break.

It probably has to do with the USB devices you installed. Remove all devices connected to the machine except the monitor, mouse and keyboard (use a wired keyboard and mouse if possible) and see if it starts. If it does then plug in the devices one by one and restart each time, until you find the one that fails. Remove the device that fails either via add/remove programmes or from the device manager, depending on what it is. If it wont start with everything unplugged then boot to safe mode and try and uninstall all the devices that you recently installed.

The files you deleted in your downloads folder will surely not be the problem.

Do you know whether SP1 installed itself before this problem started? It hasnt been out long.

I would much rather pay the extra 55B to eat at the other place. The quality of the ingredients is far greater.

Lek and Apex dont even have proper bacon and their bread is that nasty sweet stuff. Diana Dragon (not Diana Inn) used to have the best 110B buffet breakfast in that area but they recently stopped having croissants, even though the croissants werent the best when they had them. It is still better than the others though, in the 110B group, as it does have proper bacon and it is 5B cheaper.

My ROI of 6/7/8% is REAL and allows for all deductions including agents fees, renovations etc.

You are very lucky indeed to get that much. I wouldnt pay half of that.

"for more efficiency when the a/c is running."

What you need is double glazing. It will also reduce noise significantly. I'm amazed that this isn't standard here.

Thank you for the review 2 days before the start already PASCAL

I can review (preview?) it because according to them it will be the same buffet as at the Poseidon. Same management, same price, same same. They gave me a printed colour brochure announcing the move a fortnight ago at the Poseidon. If it turns out to have changed for the worse after the move then I will be the first to moan about it here, when I have tried it.

I have no connection whatsoever with either establishment, apart from having eaten breakfast a couple of times at Poseidon.

Oh, and they are starting an afternoon cake, sandwich and coffee buffet at 135B, I think. I have no idea what that will be like but the breakfast croissants are great and so it bodes well for cakes, and the bread is also great which must be good news for sandwiches.

There are just too many errors in these automated translation sites for them to be of any real use, unless you dont care at all about the result being amateurish.

I do not think that many wealthy Westerners move to Thailand at all. They prefer Tahiti or the South of France.

Oddly enough I left one of those places to retire here, just a few months ago.

However I would agree that really wealthy people would only come to SE Asia to "slum it". For anything approaching day to day luxury the wealthy will stay in nice, safe expensive places.

(Some people here may be out of touch with prices etc. in the real world. A perfectly ordinary small cup of expresso coffee in a small town railway station in Europe cost me 160B recently. I eat for two full days for that here!)

Hmmm...I wonder what values my condo units will have tomorrow, or even a week from now.

Obviously only the almighty knows that.

What we probably do know is what similar properties may have changed hands for recently. The ulimate test of value is, of course, to put it on sale and reduce the price until someone actually buys it. Then you know today's value down to the last satang.

it's really weird with the taxes and vat that thailand has.I'm surprised the average thai can buy anything.

Hmm. Try Europe.