The website prominently displays a host of award badges from sites such as Softpedia and Tucows, and the list of available software, available languages and support forum all suggest some degree of professionalism.

I downloaded Video Converter 6 and installed it. My first impressions were that the software looked reasonable enough. There were a couple of more clues that English wasn’t the developer’s first language (why don’t these guys ever get things translated properly?) but the features looked pretty impressive. I tried it out with a Blu-Ray copy of Gran Torino and once I watched it rip 15 minutes’ worth without crashing, I decided to support the company by buying a license. As I went out later, I didn’t actually get a chance to use the software to back-up any movies until this morning.

This morning I put in a DVD – Breach in fact – and started the backing up process. Immediately I noticed that AVS4YOU’s software was much slower than the FREE DVD Video Converter from DVDVideoSoft. I’ve used this software to back up some of my movies in the past but had decided to buy a product in the end because of the annoying popups that DVD Video Converter gives you when you close the program. Nevertheless, I let it complete the backup as I wanted to make sure that the default quality settings gave me comparable results.

After the backup had completed, I opened the file. Pretty much immediately I could tell that the audio and video were out of sync – just enough to be noticeable at first, but as I skipped through the movie the delay between what you saw and what you heard got bigger and bigger. Annoyed that AVS4YOU’s software couldn’t even make a backup of a simple DVD at default settings, I went to the support area of their website and opened a ticket to ask if there were any special settings that I was supposed to use to make this software work. That was around 8 hours ago, but so far I’ve received no answer.

Immediately after posting the support ticket, I checked out their forum to see if anyone had had the same problem and – more importantly – had offered a solution. I found a thread dating back 2 years where some guy had experienced exactly the same problem when trying to back up to AVI. This didn’t look good. I progressed through various similar posts and the company’s poorly-written replies before finally ending up on page 10 where I submitted my own account.

I basically laid it all out – I’d bought the software yesterday, found that it didn’t work properly and was disappointed to see that these issues had been going on for over two years. I stated that a free alternative from DVDVideoSoft was able to give me perfect results in half the time and asked if these issues were going to be fixed or if I was going to get a refund.

All day, I had no reply – nothing from the forum and nothing from the support ticket. Then, around 20 minutes ago I decided to check out the forum to see if anyone else had posted anything after me. To my amazement, I saw that the post I made this morning had been edited – gone was the mention of DVDVideoSoft’s free software and gone was the bit where I asked if I could get a refund. To top it off, there was no reply! Someone had actually taken the time to edit my post, but hadn’t bothered to reply to it nor to my support ticket!

I composed another message on the forum that left the company in no doubt that I wanted either working software or a refund and that if they messed around with my posts again, I would write about my experience here. A couple of minutes later though, I decided that it would be best to write about my experience on here anyway so that others can avoid making the same mistake that I made and avoid buying sub-standard software from a company that would rather spend its time editing its users’ forum posts than offering any kind of support.

I uninstalled AVS4YOU’s poor excuse for software and found that it left behind two more applications – an “update manager” and a “software navigator”, both of which I had to manually uninstall despite having just uninstalled the tool that was responsible for them both.

As I’m sure AVS4YOU will edit my last two posts (or maybe even delete them completely) rather than offer me some customer service, here’s a screenshot of the forum as I left it.

Update #1: AVS4YOU still hadn’t replied by the next day, so I opened a dispute on PayPal in order to get a refund. I guess AVS4YOU would prefer that its customers don’t know that they can do this (for up to 45 days after purchase), but they can and they should.

Update #2: AVS4YOU have now deleted all of my posts on their forum bar the original one that was heavily censored. They claimed that each post broke one of their forum rules – either by “advertising another product” or by “making a complaint against a moderator”. It seems you have to be happy both with their sub-standard software AND with their questionable forum censorship practices in order for your posts to be left alone on there. I’ve made one final post, making absolutely sure that it doesn’t violate any of their “rules”, which contains a link to this article – let’s see how long it stays on there and what the excuse is when they remove it!

Update #3: It’s gone! It lasted 24 hours but now Vlad has deleted it and emailed me to inform me of the deletion, though he’s completely neglected to tell me which forum rule it broke in order for it to be deleted. I’ve replied and asked for clarification. That Vlad and AVS4YOU continue to demonstrate the kind of censorship rarely seen outside of North Korea even though I’m reporting every instance is astounding.

Update #4: Incredibly, Vlad replied to tell me that the post was deleted for being “off topic”. This whole thing has become farcical so I’ve asked for ALL of my posts to be removed immediately. I have no wish to have any posts on what is an absolute JOKE a forum – especially ones that have been doctored to say something totally different to what was intended. So far he’s deleted everything except my initial (doctored) post, including his own fake reply, but he’s now disabled my account so that I can’t post any more links to this article.

Vlad, you’re lucky that I have ethical standards or I’d have edited your post to say “Our software sucks and we are all unprofessional clowns!”.

The reason for sending the unit back is simple; though actually diagnosing the problem was far from it. Having hooked the D-Link up to my Netgear DGN2000 which was now running in modem-only mode, my internet download speed dropped from 20mbit to 10mbit. Because it wasn’t actually the D-Link that was dialling up, this unit wouldn’t give me any connection details other than “connected” (which was far from helpful) so I had to disconnect that and connect to the Netgear directly in order to access its webmin and check the details on there. The Netgear reported a 20mbit connection, and yet whenever I downloaded anything on any of the computers, I was getting 250kb/sec max.

It turns out that the D-Link was establishing a mere 10mbit connection to the Netgear (the D-Link being a gigabit unit and the Netgear being a 100mbit unit), so no matter how fast my internet connection was I was only ever going to get 10mbit from it. I set the D-Link to force a 100mb connection and when that didn’t work I tried the gigabit option, which also didn’t do anything. Hardly performance that you’d call “Xtreme”, is it, D-Link? There was no such option on the Netgear. I disabled QoS, packet shaping, UPnP and everything else that was there to be disabled but no, nothing made any difference so I logged into PIXmania, found my order and requested an RMA number. I wrapped the D-Link back up in its French SKU box and prepared it for posting. I then did what I now wish I had done at the beginning and ordered a gigabit switch, which I’d use to connect everything to the router and get the best of both worlds – a gigabit internal network and a 20mbit internet connection.

I connected everything back up to the Netgear for now and put that back in modem/router mode, only to find that this was now playing up and refusing to issue a DHCP IP address to one of my computers. Also, one of its ports refused to work with any device. I’d had another Netgear router do this to me 18 months ago – the DG834G – which was what I’d replaced with the DGN2000. Really angry at this point, I binned the Netgear, vowed never to buy any of their crap again and hooked up the old Thompson router that we got from O2 a year ago. Everything connected to that without any problems.

The gigabit switch arrived a few days ago and so far everything with the internal network is fine, though there is an issue with O2′s router which I’m hoping a replacement router from O2 will fix, but I’ll write about this separately as it appears that a number of others are experiencing the same thing.

Hassle, hassle and yet more hassle!

* I say apparently because while the maths behind that increase ratio does make sense, the maths also predicts transfer rates of more like 12.5mb/sec on a 100mbit line – so to be getting 8-10mb must mean there’s quite an overhead involved…

Anyway, after looking around I settled on a D-Link Xtreme N Gigabit DIR-655 and promptly searched for some prices on Google Products.

PIXmania was the first name that I’d heard of before (and bought from previously), so although they weren’t quite the cheapest I decided to go with them – the power of brand recognition working a treat. PIXmania had it for £79.90 including VAT, so I went to the site, added it to my basket and went to checkout. Just then Firefox crashed, so when it loaded back up I manually navigated to PIXmania’s site and searched for the router. To my amazement the router was now £96.98 including VAT! That’s a 21% increase in price, with the only difference being that on the first occasion I was referred from Google Products and on the second there was no referral.

I went back to Google Products and did the search again from there. Sure enough, the router came up again for £79.90, so this time I went in and bought the router from there. I checked out, paid via PayPal and now have an email receipt for £79.90.

It would seem that PIXmania is slashing prices on price comparison websites to make themselves more competitive, yet hiking them up again to non-referrals who are unlikely to have compared their prices before making a purchase. The moral of the story here is to always use price comparison websites whenever you’re making a purchase online!

A Microsoft statement said the outage was caused by a “configuration change” made to the site during testing. This, it said, had “unfortunate and unintended consequences” which included making the site unavailable.

Detecting the problem and fixing it took about 30 minutes, he said.

First question – why are people testing changes on a LIVE site? Doesn’t the largest company on earth have a test server somewhere?

Second question – why did it take 30 minutes to check the effect that this change had had on the site? When you change some of your code, don’t you test it immediately?

Final question – Where I work, if Google goes down someone notices pretty much immediately and yet no-one at Microsoft noticed Bing being down for 30 minutes? I guess a possible explanation for this is that they all use Google over there, but even then the developers responsible for this change should have been able to ignore Google for a second and test their changes on Bing before the support calls started coming in!