youngkiwi

Dairy Queen Restaurant, delightful atmosphere, great food and good prices. A bit of a trawl up the river if you don't have a car but well worth going to and very popular with the Thai's.

Your files on D which you want to protect are probably visible to the guest account because they are not located in your "My Documents" folder. When you create a new user account in Windows, there is an option to "keep your files private" and if selected all files stored in your My Documents folder will be inaccessible to other users.

The easiest solution would be to first create a new user with administrator rights via your control panel and ensure that it is set to keep your files private. This will ensure that your main user account has the correct permissions. Following on from that, your My Documents folder is by default set to be stored on your C drive. You can change the store location by right clicking on the My Documents folder on your desktop and changing the store path to your D drive. Once you have accomplished this, just move all of your files from your D drive into your protected My Documents folder, and finally, delete your old user account (which may not have the correct permissions on it). In the end you will be left with two accounts, your main account plus the guest account which will not have access to your protected files. And remember to set a password on your main user account.

You can achieve all of this without any third party software add-on which is unnecessary if you configure Windows as outlined. Hope this helps.

Many hotels do block port 21 (the FTP port). I have experienced this numerous times. If you run your own FTP server you can change the port your FTP server listens on, or ask your hosting company and they might allow their FTP server to listen on multiple ports.

California is a large and stable gym operation and they're very unlikely to go under, or change ownership at this time. Even if they did change ownership, it is common practice for the new owner to honour existing membership agreements. It is a risk of course but in reality, I'm not at all concerned about that especially at such a low lifetime membership fee.

Like many businesses which offer deeply discounted promotions from time to time, this type of strategy works when the business has what they consider to be 'excess capacity' without affecting their main margins. From the looks of it, California has plenty of recurring membership subscriptions creating a large cashflow, so they can warrant giving out a limited number of lifetime memberships without impacting on their revenue stream. It is a fact that not all customers will attend the gym at any one time, not to mention the high drop-out rate of attendees.

The purpose of my thread was to get views on whether the deal offered is a good one or not. Seems pretty good to me. I'll try and haggle with them a bit more to see if there is any further movement, then I'll be signing with them shortly.

Just had a call from a California Fitness sales rep offering a lifetime membership for 12,000 baht with yearly membership renewal of 999 baht (waived for the first 3 years).

In addition, as part of this promotion they offered an additional full membership (for a friend) for one year for free.

What do you think? Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Even new drives can fail. The lesson to be learn't here is always take a backup.

Koh Samui over Koh Phi Phi anyday! There are some beautiful resorts in Koh Samui and if you're on one of the smaller beaches, it isn't so crowded at that time of year.

The definition of "apartment" in Thailand generally means the building is owned by the same owner on the same title, for example, a Thai family, whereas in a "condo", the units typically have different owners.

I get excellent performance on KSC Broadband. Pricy but reliable.

For high volume, you can negotiate a lower fee. They don't advertise this but once you have a steady volume, you can apply to remittances for your commission fee to be reviewed. This can make a significant difference. Worldpay have a local office in Singapore which is the base for Asia/Pacific, including Thailand. We were offered a lower rate and simply had to sign and return the amendment document and return it to the Singapore office.

The holdback of a month has never affected us doing high volume. It shouldn't be an issue either for high volume traders who have sufficient operating capital. Worldpay is owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland, have a proven track record with thousands of customers and are not a fly-by-nighter provider like many of the third party processors who have had issues or have folded in the recent years. Despite their fees, I would highly recommend them if you're looking for reliability of their system and on-time settlements.

I prefer Azureus, the java based client, although if you have a slow machine, you'd be better off than uTorrent which is also very popular.

The Fiesta Hotel, just by the river has excellent double rooms, modern decor, queen bed, satellite TV and private bathroom for $35 USD per night. Breakfast not included but you can't beat the place in terms of cleaniness and ambience. Internet service provided in the lobby and they advertised WIFI available, although I never tried it. Hope this helps.

Jack's Golf is a popular choice, or you can take a bus from Mo Chit to Aranyapratet and cross the border on your own account. The arranged service offered by Jack's Golf is easier if you are not familiar with the procedures.

We have used Worldpay for coming up eight years, and have had no problems receiving remittance settlements from them. Their fees are higher than a merchant account at a bank, but they offer speedy setup and a convenient system which is easy to integrate into web based applications. From memory, their standard commission is 4.5% but if you have high volumes you can negotiate for a lower rate. The standard holdback on funds is one month. They have also announced a major upgrade to their systems in the near future. The only negative issue we have experienced is on the rare occasion we have had to contact their technical support via email, the response has always been slow. They offer excellent phone support however. Hope this helps.

In the upright fridges, butter chicken, chicken tikka masala are my favourites, although they seem to sell out quickly

The DELL XPS M1210 is a 12" lightweight notebook with all of the features and more you described. Dell do not have a big presence in Thailand however so I'm unsure if you can get one of them here. Alternatively, for robustness and reliability you can't go past an IBM. Stay clear of Acer, which are well known for screen and battery problems. Toshiba's are overpriced in my opinion for the specs vs price, and it seems the new look HP's are making a comeback, which are now widely popular in Thailand.

Most torrent files in the formats you have described are compressed using RAR. You need to uncompress them before they will play to extract the actual movie file. I suggest downloading WINRAR from http://www.win-rar.com/

The technology infrastructure is great in Singapore, plus the ease of conducting business with Singaporean companies. I love Singapore for short trips, but couldn't live there full-time.

Whenever I'm in Penang, I always stay at the Northham which is right in the heart of Georgetown. Spas in every room and beautiful pool facilities. If you shop around, you can get some sharp rates at this hotel. From memory, I paid around 150-175RM/night on my last visit.

The most upmarket facility is HydroHealth, located in the Erawan complex at Chitlom. The cost is 3000 baht for a 45 minute session.

There is no large scale bus operation as such. They do have mini buses and pickups, however they are crowded and often overloaded. The best way to get to Angkor after crossing the border is to hire a private taxi (they are just by the traffic circle after you clear Cambodian immigration). There are taxi touts around who will call out to you anyway so you can't miss them. Negotiate hard, but you should be able to get a taxi for 1200-1500 baht. I have done this trip more than 40 times and you strike the odd taxi who demands more. Just stand around and eventually they will come round. Sometimes there is a change of taxi half way. This is quite normal and depends on the driver. The number one rule is not to pay until you reach you destination in Angkor. The road is very bad, pot holes, etc, but certainly having the comfort of your own vehicle (not shared) is about the best you can do. The trip takes approximately 3 hours. Hope this helps.

We have a company in Thailand that holds a FDA general import licence. That licence is due to expire on 31 December 2007. I am interested to know the procedure for renewal and whether it can be easily done by ourselves, or whether we should get an agent. Any information on the renewal fees would also be much appreciated. Please note, that the FDA general import licence is different to the import/licence which is commonly a "customs card". We already have one of those.

Thanks in advance.

All you need is to set up dynamic DNS on your internet router. I would recommend no-ip.org rather than dyndns.org as have found them to be much more reliable in terms of updating your IP number. The use of a dynamic DNS provider allows you to use a dynamic IP number (the type your internet provider usually allocates you) and is a work-around if a static IP number is not available or desired. Of course you will need to forward the relevant port on your router which your cam operates on (most likely port 80), or setup DMZ to point to your cam. The config may sound complex but actually it's very simple to set up. Good luck and hope this helps.

Or you could buy Kaspersky. It's not free, but it's the best. Check out www.kaspersky.com