Well I have actually been working with the product, Magicjack, for a long time…I just never saw the need to want one until I really started looking at my phone bill.

With my internet service and my phone service, we were averaging around $88 per month…$45 of that alone wound up being my home phone.

I needed a home phone for 2 reasons:

• Our satellite system required a phone line to dial out (not really an issue but more about that in a minute).
• The wife’s family lives out of the country and we weren’t wanting to pay for the international cell charges or mess with “are the online” with products like msn messenger or skype.

Now about a year or so ago I had purchased a Magicjack, set it up and then sent it with my father-in-law for him to use while he was at home.  This would allow him to be wherever there was a computer with internet access and be able to make or receive a local call from the US.  So we were able to pick up any phone here and make a call out of the country as if it were a local call…so no long distance…all for $20 per year.  That was my first personal experience with the magicjack and while I was impressed with it, there was something keeping me from making the plunge to purchase one for my home.  What that was, I really don’t know but these are the main issues that I have with the magicjack and I think prolonged my purchase.

• The computer the magicjack is hooked up to has to remain on at all times for the magicjack to work.  All calls made while the magicjack is offline will go onto the magicjack’s voicemail system.
• The software required to run the magicjack is something that can’t just be tucked away in the background.  Sure you can hide it down to the taskbar, but whenever a call comes through or the phone is picked up to dial, the software takes focus.  Most people won’t even notice this…I do because it will close down whatever game I’m playing to focus on the magicjack.  Not very good when you’re deep in it playing Call of Duty or something similar.
• Can’t keep your old number.

Basically in the long run I did decide to make the switch and besides the software popping in and out while playing, I don’t have any REAL complaints.  My computer is always on and my old number just got calls from telemarketers all day long.  As for any issues with “well running your machine uses electricity”…true but it only equals to about $13 per month in electrical charges.  Remember I’ve reduced my $45 per month charge for phone service down to $1.67… so that’s not an issue.  As I said before, the computer was always on so it’s not a change.

Now, if you’re a person who calls international, Vonage has recently stated that they now offer free international calls to 60+ countries around the world with their $25 per month service.  That’s pretty tempting if you call international frequently and for long periods.  If not, the magicjack will also give you the option to prepay to call internationally.  From what I have seen, their pricing plans for most countries are pretty competative, ranging between 1.8 and 5 cents per minute.  Some more obscure countries calling to cell phones run closer to 18 cents. Even at that price point, it’d take you over 2 hours of calling to that place to warrant getting Vonage.  If you’re fortunate enough to have someone in a $0.02 per minute country, you have 20 hours of calling before you hit the Vonage limit.

When connecting the magicjack line in your home there are really two ways to do this.  Either purchase a cordless phone and base station with multiple phones connecting to the same base (common now) or disconnect your phone line where it comes in from the phone company (usually on the outside of the house) and plug the magicjack into the wall…now all of the jacks in your house will have dial tone.  Each person will do this differently, I opted for the first since I’ve always used the single base with multiple phones.

Bottom line, if you are looking for an alternative to your home phone service because you really can’t see yourself using it like you used to, I’d pick up a magicjack.  For the $40 price tag and with it getting you the first year of phone service included, that’s less than what I was paying for in a month.

I have been using the same machine at the office for the past few years. In that time I have upgraded the hardware from time to time, had hardware go bad and had all out system failures. If I needed to, I had the Windows XP install disk that I could do a repair from and it would be an effortless thing. Boot from the disk, press a few keys, hit “R” to do a repair install. It takes all of the core system files and puts them back to the originals from the cd. All of your files are still there and your system boots up as if nothing had happened.

So since I am who I am at the company, my machine was elected to be upgraded to Windows Vista Business edition. No real problem for me, I turn off most of the features that make people crazy, like the User Account Control. So things were fine and dandy with the system running as it was, I even upgraded to SP1.

Disaster struck last week when my motherboard died and I was forced (poor me) to upgrade most components since the socket is no longer supported. So as I figured, the change of hardware caused Windows to fail to boot as I’ve seen so many times before.

Here’s where the pissing me off part happens. I downloaded my copy of Vista where I was directed to from Microsoft’s website…Digital Locker. Nice program, worked perfectly. Click, Pay, Download and the installer runs right from your desktop, installing the new OS as you wait. When you finish, you can even make a backup CD/DVD of what was downloaded. Sounds like a dream except that the DVD isn’t bootable with the upgrade version. So now to get the machine running, you have to take your old version of Windows (XP Professional for me) and do either a completely clean install (format) or a clean directory install (new windows directory)…no repair.

Long story short, I have to take my existing install of Windows Vista Business, install Windows XP Professional on the machine, keeping all the data but losing all registry and install data for existing programs already installed…so once finished installing XP I have to redo my settings, my programs, everything. Then once all updates have finished I can reinstall Vista.

Wait…reinstall Vista??? I’d be crazy to do that without a genuine BOOT DISK.