Jay

Try here, you can buy them at any Brico type dealer either from stock or to order.

[quote user="Cat"][quote user="Jay"] Apart from the news French TV is absolute utter rubbish and not worth the effort of installing. [/quote] Absolutely and utterly not quite true, IMHO [blink] [/quote] Matter of opinion I suppose.

"Probably all French, but not too much of a problem." Apart from the news French TV is absolute utter rubbish and not worth the effort of installing. I have 3 second user Sky boxes connected to cheap Castorama dishes which come complete with a decent LMB for around 30 Euro, they have worked without fail for the last six years. You then need a wall mounting and some cable. Used Sky boxes can be bought in the UK for as little as £15. Total cost of installing one box is about 80 Euro. If you want to have more than one box connected to a single dish then you will need a dual, triple or quad LMB. There is no problem getting the equipment sent from the UK. I ordered a dual LMB from here and it arrived in 3 days, I'm sure they would do the same for a digi box, there is nothing illegal about it and no reason at all why they would not ship them over here.

We have our insurance through the bank (Credit Agricole). It costs us about 600 Euro a year and includes 3rd party liability for our Gite and pool. I think you would have to specify additional cover for anyone working on the property as I think they must have their own cover, but not sure about that. We were specifically told by the Notaire to have insurance in place at the signing, there was no problem getting it before owning the property.

Gordon Plonker Brown needs to keep his big trap shut. Everytime he opens it out comes doom and gloom and the markets react accordingly. The exchange rate actually dropped below 1.22 for a while. On the brighter side oil prices have dropped again so let's hope fuel prices follow.

I declared Gite income for the first time this year (2007season) and received a letter from the tax office asking where the Gite was situated. It is in fact part of our main dwelling and I visited the local tax office and told the (not so nice) lady this. I was told I should have a siret number and I would probably get the same response next year. No further action was taken. The Gite income is a minor part of our total income.   I thought everything was sorted until I got a letter returning all the documentation I sent l’Assurance Maladie. The letter asked the following:   Vous avez declare un BIC de **** Euro sur votre avis d’imposition 2007. Veuillez nous preciser si vous etes soumis a la taxe professionnelle et de nous retourner un justificatif.   Has anyone received such a query and if so what sort of reply do they require? Any constructive help/advice would be appreciated.  

Didn't see that little bit at the bottom of the letter, thanks M. Grenouille

Received the following letter from l'Assurance Maladie this morning. All the appropriate documents were sent before the 15th September by recorded delivery. Is this a computer generated letter, like last year? Anyone received the same? We are with the Angouleme office department (16). Lors d'un précédent courrier, je vous demandais et ce, afin d'assurer le renouvellement de vos droits, de me retourner avant le 15 septembre 2008, plusieurs documents justifiant de votre situation.  Nous sommes toujours en attente des documents suivants :  -    les documents attestant de votre residence stable et effective en France. A défaut de pouvoir produire ces pieces, je vous rappelle que vous courez le risque d'une suspension du remboursement des soins (1).  -    les documents attestant de Ia régularité de votre séjour  -    l'imprimer de declaration de revenus joint a la demande initiale  -    les documents attestant de vos revenus : photocopie de votre avis d'imposition ou, défaut, de toute autre piece justificative de vos revenus.  Ces documents soot indispensables pour determiner si vous êtes redevable d'une cotisation et pour calculer son montant. En ('absence d'élément permettant d'opérer ce calcul, je serais amen& a procéder a une taxation d'office dans le délai d'un mois, conformément a Ia réglementation en vigueur (2).  Je ne saurais trop insister sur la nécessité dune reponse rapide a ce courrier.  Je reste a votre disposition pour tout complement d'information et je vous prie d'agréer, Jay

[quote user="Russethouse"]I had to turn off Zone Alarm, go to updates and delete the last one, then stop the computer updating and then turn Zone Alarm on again........ Just posting for anyone who may encounter the same.... [/quote] No need to delete the last update. This is a recognised problem and there is a fix for Zone Alarm. To get back on the net disable Zone Alarm and go HERE for the new download/fix.

[quote user="ErnieY"]Not questioning what you have or choose to save BTW but 500gb + 1Tb does sound a tad on the excessive side to me [geek] [/quote] It may seem excessive to you now but I suspect all new PC's will soon be supplied with 1Tb HDD especially as you can buy them retail now for about £80 (see here). A large hard drive will keep your full DVD and/or music collection without having a bookcase full of disks.

This back up thing has always bothered me. I try to keep the operating system on a small 80Gb HDD so it can be replaced easily if anything goes wrong and it is easy to back up. Data is another matter. I have a 500Gb drive for programs and 1Tb SATA drive for data, how on earth do you back those up without having extra drives of similar size?

First year here (almost 6 years ago now - doesn't time fly!) I assumed I could pay a cheque into any branch of CA but when I tried, out of my region, I was told it was not possible. I drove 10km down the road to my own branch and paid it in there. Bit short sighted but I think this is one of the "improvements" they are considering.

The latest. Contacted Alice from a (French) neighbours telephone to inform them my ADSL connection and telephone was down again and explained all the problems I have had in the last month (see above). Their response - "please telephone us back from the telephone connected to the computer/modem which has the problem". Thinking I was having serious difficulties with my interpretation I handed the phone to my neighbour who confirmed what the idiot was saying.

[quote user="Martinwatkins"] As to the evening drop outs,   we and the other Alice subscriber have short outages several evenings a week,  but I had exactly the same thing (worse if anything) when I was with CLub Internet.   I think it's just something that happens at peak times,   although it shouldn't be off all night.    What happens if you depower and repower? [/quote] Glad you had a good response from Alice. Resetting the modem by powering down or using the Alice software has no effect whatsoever. What I cannot understand is that I have had Tiscali/Alice for 5 years and ADSL + telephone for 11 months without any problems at all. Now, suddenly, the thing cuts off at about 10pm and doesn't come on again until early morning (typically between 7 and 8.30). When it goes down the line light comes on, the ADSL light flashes slowly and the telephone lights flash. If we lived in a town then I might agree there could be drop out at peak times but we live in the middle of nowhere and I cannot imagine anyone downloading huge amounts at 5am, anyway surely it would be more likely to cut off between 4pm and 8pm. During the day I get a full 2 Meg with average download speeds of 240Kb/s which I think is exceptional for this area. I am not a computer novice and know there is nothing wrong with my equipment the problem must therefore be with the line or Alice. Convincing them of that is another matter.

You can get a % of the total cost of the purchase, depending on income and the no. of years you wish to pay. If the house is 150,000€ then you can go for say 50,000€ mortgage (as an example) and pay your fees out of that, you have no need to specify what it is for, other than a mortgage. All the money must be up front when you sign the paperwork anyway. Provided you have the income to service the loan there should be no problem getting the reasonable percentage you need. I presume you are talking of a mortgage from a French bank? If that is the case have a look at http://www.ca-charente-perigord.fr/particuliers/pret-immobilier/e-immo.html You can either get a quotation by email or use the simulator.

Two weeks ago I lost both my ALICE internet and telephone connection for a couple of days. I phoned them on their free 1033 number and explained the problem. To my utter amazement the very next morning both my Internet and telephone were working again and almost immediately afterwards received a mail from them asking me to fill in a satisfaction questionnaire. Being lazy and having lots of other stuff to do on the net I promptly forgot about it, which is fortunate. That night at about 10pm the whole thing went down again and has done so every night since. It cuts off at about 10pm and doesn’t come on again until next morning. My wife recons they have put a curfew on me for downloading too much during the night. After several calls to the helpline plus emails to the support staff I am no further forward. One of their very “helpful” suggestions was that my modem was tired. That night I gave it a sleeping pill and a drink of coke and left it off all night. Still no joy. I then filled in the questionnaire, guess what I said? I am now writing to their head office in Marseille to see if I can get a fix before changing ISP’s. I would be most interested in anyone else who has had similar problems with Alice or any other ISP for that matter, and whether you managed to get a result.

[quote user="ColinE"]Hi Heard today oil barrel prices had drop from 135$ to 122$ a barrel, dont see any petrol or diesl prices coming down, they are quick to put them up, same old story. Colin [/quote] Oil prices have shot up more than 10 US dollars to a new record above 138 dollars a barrel after a Morgan Stanley analyst predicted prices could hit 150 dollars by July 4.     http://uk.news.yahoo.com/pressass/20080606/tuk-oil-prices-surge-to-new-record-6323e80.html

Yes

[quote user="Clair"]Personal Video Recorder. You can program it to tape a whole series without having to revisit the recording menu. [/quote] Whats this tape stuff? Is it something new? Our recorder uses disks but I'm always interested in something different!

[quote user="phylisbide"]Sorry, thought I was being helpful. Phylis[/quote] It's always good to find another site of interest. Sorry if I was a bit rude!

[quote user="Bob T"] Wise words in the last sentence Jay. Shame that you illegally drove your car on UK plates for nine months though. [/quote] Why a shame? I was actually stopped by the police 6 months into our stay and breathalysed, they looked over the car, checked the plates and insurance/CT in the windscreen and wished us a good day (in perfect English) – no problem. The insurance company didn’t see it as a problem either, they gave us insurance for 6 month then extended it for another 6 when we hadn’t completed the changeover to French plates.

When we moved permanently to France we ran our UK registered car with UK plates, French CT and insurance for approximately nine month before changing it to French plates. We were given full no claims discount by the insurers here after providing a letter from our UK based insurance company confirming we had full discount and that we had not had an accident in the previous 3 years. When we bought a second car we also got full discount on that too. An imported car will obviously cost a little more to insure, just as it does in the UK. Prices here compare favourably with the UK I think and breakdown/recovery is included in the price and usually the car is insured for any driver (check policy!). If you have the car on finance you are supposed to inform them or pay it off before you move the car here permanently.

[quote user="John Martin BRADLEY"]From many conversations I've had with people, two years seems to be a recurring timeframe for people living off-the-record to get caught out.  [/quote] Do you really think so? I have friends that have had a home here for 15 years and lived here permanently for 8 years. They had Gites income and an E111 in case they got sick. Their daughter goes to school here. They have never paid taxes. Recently they sold their large home and purchased two smaller properties. They have a big problem now, of course, if the want to join the healthcare system.

The official rate is as BobDee wrote 1.3636. This was the figure quoted by several tax offices and the response from gouv.fr - what more could you ask?

[quote user="Clair"]Sorry SD [:$] Roulez au pas = drive at walking speed [/quote] My translator says "Roll to the step" - think I need to replace it!