I would, of course keep the thread going as well but the Skype idea is just to try to convince the OP that what I am suggesting actually works, the detail of how it works is already on the thread but the OP is either reluctant to try it or has convinced himself that it is not going to work. I should give up altogether but I have put a few hours into this one and hate the thought of quitting. Thanks for the useful comments anyway!
Thanks for that Brianzion. BTW how are your roundabouts doing????
I always think of your town as when I was a very young boy, I lived close to what we called the "Cambridge Arterial Road" It was, in fact the A10. They started to widen this road just after the war (WW2, just so you know I am not that old)
When they got to a junction someone had the bright idea of creating this circular area where there was no need for traffic lights. They called it a roundabout. There was much controversy at the time but the then Ministry of Transport announced that it was only to be a temporary measure until something better was designed. And so history was made and Milton Keynes was born!
I don't guess that it doesn't matters much, since everyone's experience will vary, but I could never recommend Skype, because I had a one year subscription with them, and never got to use it once...except to their testing number. It may have all been due to the hardware that I tried, but I did try several ways, including a telephone that was supposed to be specifically designed for making Skype calls, and none of them worked. On top of that, after I cancelled my subscription, they went ahead and billed my credit card for another year. They did refund that charge, but that, along with the fact that I never got any support from them about hardware gave me a bad taste in my mouth.
But hang on there - Skype is FREE. Joan Archer and have talked have used it for both video and speech.
Whether it is free or not depends on the type of subscription that you have.
One of the basic differences between the free version of Skype and the subscription version is that with the former you can only have one video connection at a time whereas the sub. version allows up to ten persons on a video conference. If as you say you never used it at all I guess you just wanted to try it. The free version would have suited you surely. But then it's your money:)
Unless it has changed, the free subscription doesn't include calls to regular landline telephones, it was free from PC to PC only (from a quick glance, it appears that with free subsciption calls to landline telephones includes a per minute charge) . Plus, if you wanted your own Skype telephone number, it also cost.
You are perfectly correct there. But it would have been unreasonable for free software to provide free landline phone calls. Everybody with a computer would have taken up that offer. Skype would have gone bust within about two minutes I should think!
In any case, the "free" Skype service is not free. it's all a matter of whether you pay them now or later. Since it would be very rare for me to want to call someone who had a computer (to which I knew their Skype number), nearly all of my calls would have included a per minute charge. Personally, I prefer to know up front what anything is going to cost me, and the annual subscription fee was very reasonable...if one could use it.
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