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The Good Food Guide (Delete ("Which?" Regular Guides))
Which? Books (
02 October, 2003 )
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Lots of good advice but fun too!  |
Deborah Hunt has set up and run a B and B in France for real. She and her husband are both architects by profession and so the book includes plenty of hints and tips about what to look for when buying a suitable property and also repairing and renovating it for B and B purposes. Also lots on getting the business up and running profitably. As well as all the serious advice there are light touches such as a possible Basil Fawlty type response to an enquiry from a Brit lady with cut glass accent asking if there would be enough hot water! To me this makes it not just informative but a good read as well, especially if you want to know what happens behind the scenes and how and what ‘they’ think of ‘us’! There’s a chapter on how to deal with officials of all sorts from M. Le Notaire to a surveyor (not usual in France but recommended) when buying and converting. Also, once in, folk such as tax, health VAT and banks and settling in generally including the benefits of ‘making your number’ with the local police……just in case of real problems and, again a light touch, how a gendarme’s parents came to stay as guests. The book details the Hunts’ successes and misfortunes over a 10 year period and there’s plenty of serious advice on what to do and not to do to make it all pay. It also includes short interviews with other folk in the same business which gives a slightly different but useful perspective. There are glossaries, which cover the essential French words for the chapter concerned and suggestions for learning or improving your French with the wry comment that it won’t just ‘rub off’ on you once you get there. Altogether a definite first stop for anybody contemplating starting B and B in France but even if setting up in France is only a fond daydream or if you just visit French B and B’s regularly well worth reading.
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Faultless electronically, just needs a better antenna |
The Netgear devices are rapidly becoming the industry standard for wireless devices, the installation of most of their hardware is moderately simple and the tools and monitoring software is pretty self-explanatory.The only slight downside is the limited range of the antenna. If you’re practically sitting on top of your access point (the device you are connecting to) then it will be OK. The rather under-sized 2dB omni-directional antenna will have a clear line of site range of 100m – pretty good you might say, until you realise the a single brick wall may reduce that by 90% to 10m. Two brick walls and you will be relying on the complex patterns of radio constructive interference to get a good signal – and a prayer might help! So you may well be buying a 54Mbps 802.11g card and only ever achieving 2Mbps because the signal is just so weak. As this is a desktop device, you may find that investing in a 5-6dB directional radio antenna the tonic to making your wireless experience a whole site more pleasurable. After all, it’s advisable to focus the power that your Netgear card generates towards the access point instead of the omni-directional antenna which sprays the signal in all directions wasting the majority of the power. [By the way, dB is a logarithmic scale, so you will be increasing the radio signal considerably by going from a 2 to a 5dB antenna.] All that said, without a reliable and easy-to-use wireless network interface card such as this you won’t be going anywhere! This is a good mainstream purchase for a desktop system.
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This card surpassed my expectation  |
I just upgraded my sons PC. My old SMC USB adapter would not work even the Windows XP Pro says it is working fine. Since I have all Netgear stuff in my home network and work great, I looked at Netgear "stuff" first for the replacement. I wanted to try a different interface; via PCI vs. USB.After reading some reviews on MA311 card I gave it a shot on this card for future upgradability. since all Netgear "stuff" requires to install the drivers and utility prior to installation, I did, and wow, I thought my old SMC USB adapter was pretty good on my sons old Dell, but this card surpassed my expectation. It was picking up a couple of more my neighbors access points I didnt see before, and getting full 11MB/s connection from my MR814 with 128-bit WEP. The utility have much better interface from my MA401 cards. And this is something definitely worth the money. Being a realy picky bargain hunter, I did not mind at all for paying the full price on this card. Cant wait to find a good deal on 802.11g AP and try its full speed.
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