Prize clarification and market research

Gosh, a lot of comments on my post about winning £100. I should have been clearer yesterday, but didn't have time to go into too much detail as had to get a bath and light the fire in the living room before Helen and David came round to collect Brodie... Boo hoo, am missing a purring puss-cat leaping onto the bed for morning pampering already!

David spent ages sorting out the desktop computer, and has retrieved all my data. Hip hip hooray! He's taken the Acer away and will remove the hard drive to work on it. Also will try and find the fault... Suspect it's motherboard or chip wrecked by being spattered with G&T. My advice is don't leave an almost empty glass by your computer where you are likely to kick it over in the middle of the night if you happen to be restless!

Anyway, I think it is a genuine win. I am on a few market research panels, and the £100 was from a prize draw for filling in questionnaires. Some panels give points that eventually add up to vouchers for high street or online stores. Some do a mixture of points and prize draws. The prize is from GfK.

And there's also YouGov which pays 50 pence for most of their surveys (can be a little more or less) which sends you a check for £50 when you reach it. They also do a few prize draws too. I've had 2 £50 cheques from them, and am about half way to my next one. Mind you, I've been a member since around 2003, it does take a while to build up enough points to get a cheque! But a useful amount when it comes.

I've also won Amazon vouchers, and currently have a £12 Voucher for CD-Wow waiting to be spent (can't spend it before Christmas as usually get a couple of DVDs or CDs). I find it quite soothing doing online questionnaires, and there's no compulsion to do all of them that arrive in my Inbox. Sometimes I can't be bothered with them, but if I'm having a bad few days it's something to do that isn't too taxing and even brings some small rewards.

Mary, with regard to your comment, there's no need to apologise! I quite understand why you might think that the email was bogus. If I hadn't known where it came from I would have been suspicious too!

I used to enter quite a lot of competitions, but seem to have got out of the habit recently. Mind you, there wasn't a lot of spare time for stuff like that this year! Might get back to doing it, had some nice wins - a DVD recorder, 2 personal organisers, CDs, books, 2 nights for two in a 5* London hotel, though never managed the "ultimate" prize of a car! And it's always exciting when the postman calls - you never know when a LWE (long white envelope) will drop through the door bearing tidings of a win!

If any of my kind readers want to give online comping a go, a good place to begin is the Loquax website. There's also a useful UK newsgroup devoted to comping, uk.rec.competitions. Happy comping folks!