Manager Alex Ferguson broke his usual disdain for speaking to the media to say:

“I can’t reveal the identity of the CTB. All I can tell you is that Some Say he likes things shoved up his arse”.

“His identity needs to remain the closely guarded secret that it is.”

Think you know who the CTB is? Leave a comment. All comments will be published, apart from any that are correct of course.

The Channel Islands enjoy exemption from UK VAT (sales tax). I’d always wondered why this would be, and unable to find any reason for it I asked a few people. The overwhelming answer that came back was that the Channel Islands were granted exemption from VAT after World War II as a means of recompense as the British Armed Forces failed to prevent occupation of the islands by the Germans. Sounds fair enough really – the occupants of the islands had been UK tax payers and as such had every right to expect the protection of the British Armed Forces against invasion.

Now, World War II ended in 1945. Any islanders that survived the war as adults will obviously now be close to 80 years of age, or more likely dead. The vast majority of the population would have been born post 1945 and not have experienced the occupation by Germany.

Of course, it goes deeper. Companies are exploiting the VAT exempt status by setting up logistics on the islands, and shipping goods into the UK without having to charge VAT (the products they sell have to be lower than £18 in value of they will fail to avoid the tax). There is a long list of companies including Play.com, TheHut.com, HMV, Tesco and (of course) Amazon.

I was reading on Amazon the other day about their “preferred” merchant, IndigoStarFish.com. The official line from Amazon refers to IndigoStarFish as a separate entity. Presumably there is a reason for this, and there is some information online suggesting that the mass distribution of CDs & DVDs from tax exempt locations into the UK is supposed to be regulated, but clearly nothing is happening. Amazon might refer to IndigoStarFish as their “preferred merchant” but since Amazon OWNS 51% of IndigoStarFish, that’s just a bit rich.

Please don’t be naive enough to believe this is all for your benefit as a UK consumer getting cheaper CD’s & DVD’s. Merchants operating out of the Channel Islands typically undercut their UK Mainland based competition by 10%. Bare in mind they are saving 17.5% by not having to charge VAT. So whilst avoiding tax, they are also making an extra 7.5% on the bottom line. Remember, small items can go through the Royal Mail, and the Royal Mail serves the Channel Islands. A first class stamp costs the same in the Channel Islands as it does in Birmingham or London so the merchants operating from there have no additional logistical costs, despite what must be a huge cost to the Royal Mail – that’s something you and me here in the UK are subsidising every time we buy a stamp. Additionally, it’s estimated that by moving goods from the UK out to the Channel Islands then back agian means a CD or DVD you buy online has travelled an extra 1000 miles just to make this whole tax dodge work. So here are the “costs” & savings broken down:

• You’ve saved 10% on your new DVD movie.
• The merchant has increased his bottom line profit by 7.5%
• The merchant gets extra business simply because his mainland competitors are unable to compete (remember Woolworths? this is a major factor in their demise)
• If you think CO2 is damaging the environment, ask if it’s worth your CD travelling another 1000 miles so you can save a quid.
• Royal Mail (by charter) incurrs huge extra costs WHICH YOU PAY FOR by having large volumes of post from an offshore location

Now, IndigoStarFish. I had a look into this. The guy at the head of this company (Alan Cox) is there to the right raising his glass to you. He looks happy doesn’t he? Well he would, he doesn’t pay VAT when he buys the wine he’s drinking. I could be wrong, but he doesn’t look 80 to me, so he’s enjoying a glass of VAT free wine while not having to have gone through the rather tedious inconvinience of having suffered under Nazi occupation of his home.

I’m guessing, but could the name of his company be some kind of corporate joke? Clearly he’s set up a distribution company in cahoots with Amazon. They have in the past had some quite high profile legal battles with a Canadian bookseller called Indigo. To me, it sounds like the name of this company is basically a one finger salute to that Canadian company. Just because I’m pedantic, I’d also point out that “StarFish” is a meaningless term – there’s no such thing. The correct term is “Sea Star” as any educated person knows. If you’re not educated that’s no problem – you can learn this by watching SpongeBob Squarepants.

I couldn’t help but read what was on his website – here’s a couple of snippets which I’ve thoughtfully covered with a translation into English:

“We will take all reasonable steps to manage our operations so as to minimise our environmental impact and to promote good environmental practice.”

hmmm – by making a CD travel an extra 1000 miles?

“We look actively for opportunities to improve the environment and to contribute to the wellbeing of the communities in which we trade.”

Er, you ( and a bunch of other companies) are directly responsible for the destruction of (for example) Woolworths at a cost of close to 30,000 jobs here in mainland UK – have you got any idea of the economic impact of that number?

I was going to drop a link to his website, but I noticed there’s not one backlink on Amazon.co.uk to their “preferred merchant”. Presumably is Amazon  don’t want to link to it, there’s a reason right? After all, Amazon are a company to trust right?

Firstly (this is more for the event the laptop ends up going to someone else) I ran the create recovery media wizard so it can if needs be get back to it’s factory installed state. You ought to do this too just in case.

Second, completely wiped the harddisk by deleting all the partitions, creating a new one and formatting. Quickest way to accomplish this is with a good boot disc – I used the Ultimate Boot CD for this.

First problem – XP isn’t going to recognise the hard disk controller as it’s not in it’s driver section. You could go for the F6 option during the XP install and load the drivers from a floppy disc, but of course this machine doesn’t have a floppy and I’m not about to buy a piece of 90′s hardware to fix this 2010 machine. Find your driver then slipstream your XP installation disc using nLite. It’s not nearly as hard as it sounds, and nLite is a free download. You’ll just need access to a machine running Windows, your Windows Disc, a copy of your Drive Controller Driver and a blank CD.

Then you can install XP. On a side note, I installed XP Pro using OEM media, but the license key from my old VAIO that this one replaced. Didn’t seem to cause any issue at all, and activated online without a hitch. Once you’re up & running you’ll need to find drivers for all the hardware so you end up with a device manager that looks like mine does:

Everything as it should be. Wireless networking, ethernet, bluetooth, camera, media keys, card reader etc all functioning. It’s a pig of a job to find drivers that will work though, so be warned. Here are some links that may, or may not help:

Modding ATI Catalyst. Basically, you probably won’t get the right driver from ATI for a laptop – they will tell you to go to your Laptop Manufacturer (Sony in my case). Sony haven’t made an XP driver for any of my hardware as they don’t support it, so modding the Catalyst is the only option. It works and it’s free.

Sony Vaio FTP Driver Archive. Basically, Sony may not have written XP drivers for my machine, but they have for plenty of others and the hardware in them is all the same stuff. I just used drivers from similar models.

HP (for the Ricoh Card Reader) This was the last one I had trouble locating. In device manager it was simply listed as “Base System Device” so finding out what it actually was was the first trick before I could start trying to find a driver.

There are other places on the web purporting to have XP drivers for Sony VAIOs, but treat them with caution and virus scan anything and everything you download.

Good luck.

1. “You’ve got a virus” – followed by complicated instructions to run various virus scanners, edit the registrty and perform multiple reboots in between.
2. “Your XP installation is screwed – re-install Windows” – this is the one Microsoft themselves seem to suggest.
3. “You’ve got a hardware fault – send it back for repair”

I didn’t fancy any of these approaches as for one, they would all demand a great deal of my time, and for another I didn’t actually believe any of these was actually going to fix the problem in any case (I know re-installing Windows will fix almost anything – but it’s a bit like buying a new car just because the old one is a bit dirty or has run out of fuel).

I did a bit more Googling to find out exactly what the ACPI Uniprocessor PC is. Something to do with the processor itself and the HAL. That in turn appears to be connected to power management. So….

I’ve switched off power management, and the problem has gone.

Of course, if you use your machine on batteries this may not be the best answer in the world. It does, however, mean you can use your computer a bit as oppsed to not at all. I only run my machine at home and at work, so I’ve always got mains power.

***UPDATE*** Turns out I’m wrong, and this was the first sign of impending hardware failure. The system board actually died completely on me. I’ve got a new post up about how I set up my new VAIO with XP Pro.