Renewing your home insurance?

I was very pleased to get a discount of £340 off my annual home
insurance premium a few days ago, by following some simple advice
I'd read on Martin Lewis' Money Saving Expert site (and the linked
forum on home insurance).

The advice is very simple -- to get a cheaper online quote from
another insurer, and then to phone up your present insurer.

My wife and I have been valued customers with Direct Line for
8 years, and faced with losing custom, the adviser very quickly
offered to match the online quote I'd obtained from Churchill
Insurance (while retaining the higher insured sums that DL was
offering).

I was interested by the fact that the chap at DL was able to see the
online quote from Churchill I'd obtained a few minutes earlier, as
he quoted me the exact amount of the Churchill quote. The wonders
of modern technology. :)

..................oooo0oooo.................


I spent the past few days trying to download the free versions of
AVG and Avast anti-virus programs without success. In fact, when
I downloaded the latter, my Windows Vista system crashed .. completely
blank screen ... and worse still, the system recovery discs I'd
made when setting up my Sony laptop, didn't work.

I phoned up my local computer expert who suggested contacting Sony
or taking it back to the vendor, which I did late yesterday afternoon.
Luckily there was computer whiz-kid bloke on the John Lewis staff who
fixed it for me in 1-2 minutes. He took out the battery - put it back
- and pressed the start button on the machine. I was gobsmacked when
I saw it all coming back to normal (via the laptop's system restore).

He told me that what he did erased the computer's recent memory, which
was locked in by the battery ... the laptop restored itself when the
battery was removed and then put back in. Amazing. I felt enormously
relieved when my Desktop screen came back on.

This morning I had a go at installing Kapersky anti-virus software, but
Windows Vista refused to recognise the downloaded .exe file. So I've
restored my trial version of Norton (which is nearly at the end of its
three month trial period. Oh, what fun. :)