Wednesday 5 July 2017

Astra K series 1.6 Diesel 12 months on

My car just had it's first service, no real issues - I think one of my blind spot sensors might need looking (it sometimes tells me there's an obstacle on my nearside when there's not - I suspect water is getting into a sensor or it's failing).

Other than that everything is spot on, the day before my service I went on some training, set my cruise control and although I had 16 miles of roadworks (50 MPH limit) I cruised at Motorway speed all the way.

For the journey I achieved an amazing MPG, it was actually 89.3 when I pulled in to Tesco for some fuel, but then I drove 4 miles in stop/start rush hour traffic (which dropped it a little by the time I got to my destination) - I had my stop/start turned off which is the main reason it dropped a little.



I find it very easy to achieve high MPG in the Astra, I chose not to have another 1 Series BMW simply because of the issues I had getting simple things like Windscreen wipers and bulbs, the BMW was a fantastic drive, it's all about the driver experience, the reality as well was that it had almost no gadgets apart from fog lights and a speed limiter.

My company monthly allowance meant I could get the Astra SRi and the extras (AGR front seats, Keyless entry/start, Advanced parking pack and Dual zone climate control) all in my monthly budget.

My BMW over it's lifetime returned an average 49.8 MPG which was much better than my Avensis or Passat (they were closer to 36.6 MPG), the Astra is returning 59.9 as it's average - I noticed the BMW difference with fewer trips to the pump, the Astra is in another  league as I'm doubling my range from the previous diesel days.

For me the cruise control in the Astra is the best I've used, while I've no doubt there are many that are better I'm sure there is a higher number that are worse, I can drop onto the Motorway and drive totally by my left thumb on the speed adjustment, the speed limiter works great as well, much easier to use both than my wifes Jeep Renegade.

Sat Nav and the on board info system is a breeze, I can alter all my settings like door locks, lights on, warning alerts etc. all from the menus and also from the driver display.

The irony of the Astra was I chose to test drive it to prove they were still rubbish cars, previous Astra's I've had were OK but nothing special compared to competitors, I found my last SRi Astra very heavy, cumbersome around bends and if you prodded the sport button the torque steer tended to favour pulling you into the nearest hedge, as with my Vectra's, Avensis and Passat, I found torque steer was always present and you often drove long distances with your left or right hand gently pulling in one direction to counteract this.

When I took the Astra on a test drive the first thing I noticed was how light it felt, the car went into bends almost identical to the 1 Series, it left cleanly and with plenty of energy, when I checked the spec I noticed the weight had been trimmed by almost 700 Kg, I then noticed no torque steer even under hard acceleration, the sport button behaved very much like the 1 Series, it responded quickly and gave a nice boost.

While testing it I noticed more internal room, more elbow and leg room a nice big info screen and all the gadgets I needed.

There are simple things that I like, such as, I'm driving along and notice no street signs, the speed limit is always in the driver display, it's rarely wrong and if I'm on the motorway and an overhead sign lights up it reads that and immediately alters the limit in the driver display.
The auto wipers and headlights, I can take or leave them but it is handy when a car or lorry splashes water as it passes or a sudden shower hits you, no need to do anything - they pop on and I have the option of disabling them in the info system if I want, the auto headlights mean I've never turned them on or off since I've owned the car.

I get an email from the car every month, telling me any problems, tyre pressures (which I can see in my driver display or on my mobile phone) as well, I can also see my mpg, journey information, oil consumption etc.

On the whole I'm totally pleased with the K series, Vauxhall were exceptional when it came to my test drive, calling ahead, dropping exactly the spec I requested, offering to explain all the controls and generally making the test drive experience a thorough 10/10 - I will add that this is also my experience of BMW, I felt totally relaxed, under no pressure but free to explore the car and ask questions.

I've driven Motorway, country roads daily and several trips over the mountains, I've even had 4 adults in and a very heavy invalid scooter and it's never skipped a beat, the handling was the same regardless, the little 1.6 Diesel performed perfectly, nice and brisk when pulling off, in town or tight country roads, effortless cruising on the motorway, it almost needs a 7th gear it's so effortless.

The BMW was a great cruising engine with it's light 1.6 Diesel, the Astra just takes this to the next level, it mops up motorway miles, is quieter than the BMW and you often have to check the rev counter to know the engine is running.

I find the steering is very close to the BMW experience, both are electric (the Astra has lane assist as well) it's light but has enough feel to it that you're not isolated from the experience, the BMW had a tiny bit more feedback, but I find the Astra is superb, on the motorway it's stable and a very easy drive, on country roads it's very close to the BMW drive, nimble and light, responsive and it feels nice and tight, the car is very well balanced - and that's without pressing the sport button.
I found over the mountains the Astra drove easier and more relaxed than the BMW, the bends and straights were great, a whoosh down the straights, a dive into the bends and not even the slightest hint of under steer or wobble, top marks to Vauxhall for engineering without doubt the best Vauxhall I've driven and if not the best car I've driven in 36 years its the second best - perhaps it's easier to say it's equal 1st place. Even my wife (who loves her Jeep) admits (reluctantly) that it's a much better drive than her Jeep (and my cruise control is much easier to use).

I recently drove an SRi 1.4 Corsa and hated the experience, the driver pedals felt like a childs Go-Kart, the steering was exceptionally light and felt totally detached from the front wheels, it needed a good push on the accelerator to get it moving and the interior (buttons, dials etc.) felt cheap and poorly designed, the A/C button was a tiny button almost at your furthest reach, no decals to make it easy to see what it was, a small red LED illuminated a logo when you pressed it, it would hardly have taken any effort to make the button easier to read and use.
The driver info display (in between the Speedo and Tacho) was a mangled array of "things", none seemed to do anything, the Astra info display is clean and clear - if I'm a safe distance behind a car my display shows a green car, get a little close and it's yellow, get too close and it's red (plus my collision detection starts to get a little touchy), the Corsa just had a slowly flashing car symbol - no idea what that means.
If I was Vauxhall I would have put the same display as the Astra across the range, it's much cleaner and useful.


Perhaps my only gripe is the stop/start, the Diesel drops the engine into standby when your are pulling to a stop, it remains in standby while you hold your foot on the brake - the BMW only worked when you were stationary (and in neutral with the handbrake on), in some ways I prefer the BMW one but I've learnt to use the Astra one, I just don't like sitting in traffic with my brake lights blazing into the eyes of the driver behind me, I feel like many automatic drivers who sit at a red light holding the brake pedal.

It's not the greatest of gripes and most of the time I'm on the Motorway anyway, apart from the possible blind spot sensor fault it's been a great 12 months.

I chose not to continue my Onstar subscription, the price wasn't too bad but you also need a data subscription with Vodafone, if it had been a simple combined package then I'm sure I would have continued it - I still get engine data and other metrics sent to me on email each month, the only feature I've lost is the on board Wifi (all our phones have data anyway) and the ability to send a Sat Nav location directly to the car.

Perhaps the only feature I've not used a lot is the auto parking, I tend to use the great reversing camera, it's got trajectory markings which means you can park in a jiffy, the auto park works well, I've parked in some tight spots with ease, it parallel parks, 90 degree parks and you can park left (by default) or put the right hand indicator on to park on the offside. it works great.
It's just that day to day I normally arrive at work in an empty car park so it's not needed, at weekends I normally let my wife drive and we rarely need the feature in supermarkets etc.
If you order the pack you get front and rear sensors (which are very well engineered - top marks on these - I found them invaluable in odd shaped car parks like Matlock, they also work while your stationary at lights etc.), you also get the auto park feature and rear camera, if I have another Astra in the future I'll definitely want this pack added.




Saturday 22 April 2017

Virgin Superhub 2 to Superhub 3 change

I had issues with my Superhub 2 around Christmas, it was replaced and this worked OK for a while but I noticed the replacement was not a new unit (refurbished?), after a couple of months I would experience very slow web page access (on wired or wireless) and randomly the internal connection to the hub would drop, the only way to restore the connection (and access to the internet was through a power cycle). I did the usual things of restoring factory settings and also the reset button (hold for 20 seconds), the hub would always work for a random period, then drop the connection, If I tried to ping the hub it simply wasn't there.

The randomness was very annoying, sometimes I would wake up in the morning and be the only person on the hub (apart from any devices doing housekeeping - Android phones etc.), I would click on a web page and sometimes it would work fine, other times I would get the dreaded slowdown then the connection would time out.

The main issue I had was talking to Virgin support, I'm quite confident the issue was their hub, if I make no other changes to any device on the network but power cycle the hub then it all works.

I have a HP Microserver plugged directly into the hub, this drops connection as well - everything drops from the hub. I found the Virgin Tech quite sarcastic, he told me there was no fault, he could connect to the hub and from his perspective there was no fault, another person told me the frequencies were a little "off" and that would fix it - I fail to see how an external frequency would stop internal connectivity ?

Finally I lost my patience (particularly after being on the phone for 90 minutes and then being cut off), another support person told me they would send an engineer, I feel quite sorry for any engineer at this point, if it's working then there's nothing he can do, if it's not then he needs a power cycle to restore service, sometimes I'm resetting the hub 6 times a day, normally 2-3 is common.

Another tech guy quite sarcastically asked how I have 8 devices connected to my hub, I've used a passive switch on one ethernet port to let my daughter plug multiple devices in, the hub is an old 100MB one but has been there for something like 7 years without issue, it also helps throttle my daughters bandwidth as it prevents her running more than 100MB, he was quite arrogant in telling me the issue was the bandwidth of the hub and he would alter it to resolve the issue - again, I'm not sure what he means by this but 15 minutes after he made this statement the hub dropped connection again.

All through these long conversations they made it clear if I wanted a superhub 3 I would have to pay for an upgrade (as there's no fault with the superhub 2), it's quite frustrating when you go around in circles and no one is listening, in all I had to restart my hub 3 times while talking to tech people, all of them said there's no issue with the hub, it must be something I'm doing or something on my network causing the problem.

After a chat with customer relations asking them to cancel my account (there's no point having it if it doesn't work), they offered me an upgrade to the Superhub 3 - this is a slightly different hub to the old one and I found some issues installing it, hopefully the notes here will help.

Initial setting up is not too difficult, the automated number (and the paperwork) said to leave the hub for 3 minutes then power cycle - I noticed it took about 10-15 minutes until the front light went white (with the other lights out), then I power cycled.

The hub then took about 40 minutes to upgrade itself and get itself on line, if you try and access it at this point through the web interface you will see messages that it's upgrading - I left it for an hour or so to let it upload etc.

I wanted to change my Admin password on the hub, it took me a couple of minutes to realise the default password is on a label underneath the hub, its a bit dark in my room so I didn't see it until I popped a torch on - a quick change of the password and that was all sorted.

Wifi is a little different, not much, you can specify two wireless SSID (one for 2.4GHz and one for 5GHz), it insists on a complex password or phrase, I'm OK with this, far too many people have weak passwords - I set them up and the hub does a soft reset, you see the networks published in a minute or so, I have a 2.4GHz AP which has been running for donkeys years, I had the 2.4GHz network disabled in my old hub 2 and I disabled it in my hub 3, if it works then I don't see much point breaking it.

One ethernet port failed to come up - I noticed 3 of the rear ports were working OK, one wasn't (I entered a long loop of head scratching as I had several problems hit me at once - it wasn't my first check to see if I had lights, I had lost connection to my server - which uses Fixed IP, I also lost connection to my NAS box and my laptop for some strange reason refused to join the 5GHZ wireless).

Tackling these issues in order I thought I would give the hub a pin hole reset, just in case something stopped the 4th Ethernet connection from coming on line, I had already moved devices around and the issue was "hard", staying with the connection. Holding the reset button for about 40 seconds I noticed the port came "up" when the hub restarted, for some people they might think the hub was faulty - I certainly thought it was DOA but was taught a lesson to remember to eliminate the basics first.

Because the pin hole reset cleared the hub I just entered the settings I had put in before, it only took a couple of minutes, one problem down - a few more to go. I have a few devices using fixed IP, nothing major but with my old hub I set my DHCP starting IP at 120 (192.168.0.120), there's no real reason for this, it was a random number I picked, my server is 192.168.0.99, my NAS box 192.168.0.100 and I have a couple of other devices using fixed IP.

I've seen strange things happen when devices are assigned fixed IP and one fix I remember is to change them back to DHCP, then let the hub or whatever assign the IP using a reservation, I changed my server to DHCP, dropped the connection and let it assign a DHCP - I clicked on the hub DHCP page and refreshed the list, I could now see my server, I popped the mac address into the DCHP reservation list and set it for 192.168.0.99 - apply the setting and then drop the connection on my server - all good, I'm now on 192.168.0.99

My NAS box is an IOMEGA 200D running NAS4FREE, it's a great operating system, the NAS is solid and never needs resetting, it just runs. I popped a cable into it so I could talk to it (I couldn't see it from the hub or on the network), most likely because it's association is with the previous hub, I logged into it through the web browser and set the network to DHCP, then told it to restart.

I set the dHCP reservation for the NAS box Mac address and it's IP for 192.168.0.100 but for some reason I couldn't see it, after a bit of fumbling around I remembered I can plug a monitor into the back of the NAS box (and a USB keyboard), I popped my monitor in and saw the NAS4FREE menu, I selected option 2 (Network congiguration), I told it to use DHCP and almost as soon as I did I saw a message that it was on the right IP address.

At this point I've got the hub 3 on line with all 4 ethernet ports working, Wifi (2.4GHz is still through my old AP, 5GHz is through the hub 3) - I've one last (and strange nut to crack), for some reason my laptop wouldn't connect.

Looking in my linux error log I see a message that there's no authentication associated with the network manager, I also noticed I can't edit the networks (they are greyed out), a quick trip on the web and I delete %conf.xml which is in ~/.gconf/desktop

 I suspect I created an issue by calling my new wireless network the same as my old one, the linux keyring will have associated secrets for the network SSID and passwords (plus some other info like UUID etc.), as soon as I cleared this file I could edit the networks and got straight on line.

All in all the hub 3 looks much better, web pages are quicker and things seem to zip along much better, it was a bit of an ordeal having these issues and in hindsight the easy solution would have been to set my server (and any other devices) to DHCP before swapping the hub out, then everything would have connected and I could have assigned fixed IP from the hub, the show stopper was the 4th ethernet connection not working out of the box.

Only time will tell if this fixes all my issues, or not.