I appreciate that but with the nokia repositories down I could not get the latest firmware of flasher!!

I have since, through contacts on this forum managed to get both :d Which is great for me but a sad indictment on the fact that I could not even get out of the mess without individuals help. Hell even the crap that MS has left my computer in has at least, courtesy of a disk, given me the option to re-install.

The device was re-flashed this morning. It now works perfectly, but as maemo.org servers are down there are a fair few apps that are not working still.

The plus points:-

• This forum is excellent
• People were kind enough to upload the latest version of the firmware for me
• It is working very well now, only the single unexpected re-boot and battery life is superb

The bad points

• The abuse, from a minority, you get for posting about a genuine problem on here!
• The fact that Nokia and Maemo servers can be down for a weekend, fantastically poor for a commercial enterprise
• The assumption that anyone who has bought an N900 is a command line guru, and is otherwise ridiculed.
• Servers being down for 2 days is considered acceptable, and we should not mention it

On balance I will stick with my N900 because it is great, but this experience make me wary. I have worked in IT for over 20 years and lived through the pain of DOS and Windows ME so not some noob. I do expect that if I have a problem with my device that with the help of the manufacturer maybe, that I could get myself out of it. My experience so far is that this is not the case.

So thank you to those who helped, including yourself Slender, thankfully the helpers are the vast majority.