With regard to John T's last post, I understand his position but personally conclude that Virgin are wrong about the way they respond to customers who want to use Outlook as the email client. Outlook is the email client for about half the INTERNET users according to a July 2009 survey (this includes versions back to Outlook for Dos). On the other hand Virgin is the preferred ISP of only a minority of users according to a similar 2009 survey around the same date. Virgin could at least inform its customers that if they first setup email using Outlook Express then they can easily copy the settings into Outlook. It is childish to respond that "Outlook is third party software and not supported". This seems a different class of problem to John T's example of router configuration, I guess the majority of users do not need to know anything about that, though the growth wireless networks is pushing the knowledge forward.
My conclusion is that for a long time cable ISP's were principally concerned with the supply of TV media and did not bother much about internet customers, though competition from the mobile sector may be changing this.
In the end a matter of choice in your ISP, I suppose. if you are not a TV client.
