I'm on AOL, with a dial up, on an old IBM with 32mb of ram and an amd k6-233....

[John Corn]

……oh my….. can you say slowwwwww


My brother-in-laws secretary dropped her computer off and asked me to fix it and after several hours and shifting in some old parts that I had lying around (nothing made after 1997 will fit in this piece of junk) I've got it up and running as fast as it can possible go...and it's the most i can do to not throw it through a window....

AOL...junk
klfex (pre-v90!)
amdk6-233 (not even a k6=2)...junk
32mb of dimm ram (72 pin, all slots filled)
4x cd-rom drive
4.6 gig hd, but it's pre-ata-33 with no DMA!!!
an old ati rage II video card (this is actually still a pretty nice video card all things considered)

someone put a bullet in my head.....please……hehehe

p.s.---this 4.6 gig harddrive took me 5 hours to defrag! It's never been defragged!

Scan disk reveled about 7 mb of cross-linked files and varios lost file bits...

240 mb of temp files in the temp directory.......

......argghhhhhh....

Although my friends parents occasionally use a 486 with a 1.6 GB HD, 16 MB RAM and a 14" monitor. I can type an entire paragraph on Word before it shows up.

[Geronimo]

we get attached to computers---or some of us do.

My first PC was a Commdore manufactued PC clone. It was an 8088 for crying out loud. Actually it had a NEC V-20 chip. It ran at "double speed" (a blazing 9 Mhz) and was capable of using expanded memory. Why I had that thing up to 2 MB of memeory and who in the world needs more than that?

I kept that thing for years past it's useful life. I even managed to get Windows 286 to run on the darned thing although it was unbelievably slow. But I spent as much keeping it going as I might have buying a 286 or possibly even a 386 SX.

I don't know some of us have to have the latest and greatest and some of us form irratioanl attachments to cheap metal boxes.

Maybe I will get it out of the clsoet hook up my old Hayes 4800 bps modem and see if I can get on Compuserve.

[Bogy]

32mb of dimm ram (72 pin, all slots filled)

Are you sure those are dimm's? Sounds like edo/fast page simm ram. 4 8 meg simms for your whopping 32 megs. You could easy swap it out for 32 meg simm's, except you don't want to buy them new at any place like BB. They want about $90 per simm.

[Bob Haller]

Please clarify something. Why do so many hate AOL. I have had it for over 5 years and think its fine. I did TRY Verizon online and didnt care for it. Why do so many consider AOL trash.

[Rage]

I hear if you log into AOL you may as well log into the NSA everyday because they spy on you I guess.

I hate AOL because of their prices and who the companies who own them are. I don't know how AOL is now but the service when I had it sucked. Especially before you could use other browsers and it was more like a online thingy rather than the real Internet. I think somebody has to be crazy to spend $23.00 a month when you can get Internet so much cheaper and I don't like the money going to going to their companies who work behind the scenes to fight against freedom and supports causes that I don't like.

Even Earthlink at $20-21 is too much to spend on Internet service.
A long time ago many who posted from AOL years ago were childish and left a lot to be desired until Webtv came along and took the crown.

Speaking of Webtv... is it still around? I never had AOL asa stand alone account because I brought my own access and only used AOL by itself when my ISP went down. Then there were all the busy signals with AOL and they pissed me off by taking away the little bit of content that I used from them on my basic BYOA account so I quit and said screw them. Not only did they take away the content that I used from my account, but raised the price ridicules high for BYOA.

[Bogy]

Personally, I don't like it because it takes over your computer. It can be ok if you stay with it forever, but don't ever try to stop. My daughter's roommate had AOL. Then they got a cable modem so she deleted AOL. After that IE wouldn't work anymore. Now I can't prove what happened, because I had not looked at the computer before she deleted it, I wasn't there when she did delete it, but when I got there, she didn't have a single protocol on her computer. I had to completely reinstall windows to get her back up and on the net.

[Steve Mehs]

Yeah WebTV is still around but M$ changed its name to MSNTV, but its still commonaly and will be forever be know as WEBTV. As for Earthlink, I I have it and love it. Not only a solid connection, but AOL 'biggest' competition. I get a $2/month Earthlink discount from the AARP, and I used to get another $2/month discount for being a Sams Club member, but that was dropped a few years ago. What I hate about AOL is their security or lack there of. In the 2 years I had AOL I would get 15 e-mails a day all being spam. And also you have no idea how easy it is to find out other AOL members passwords, and there's an easy way to get around the parental control, but im not sure if it works or not. We cancled AOL the month before the $20 to $22/month rate hike. I hated when I got this messege 'Youve been online for 45 minutes, click OK within the the 10 minutes or youll be disconnected'. AOL got big for 2 reasons, 1) comes with basically every PC. My old IBM Aptiva from '95 had AOL1.0 on it when I first got it. 2) Kids begging their parents for it becasue all there friends have AOL. And plus AOL is part of and affilated with so many companies that have geiven me hell over the years.

[Mark Holtz]

John Corn: Actually, I wouldn't knock that box too much. It may not run todays Windows apps, but I can think of some applications running under Linux that it would be perfect for.

People think AOL=The Internet, even when they use another ISP to access the service. Many of the services offerred by AOL is also availalbe through other web sites. Even AOL's Instant Messenger is available to non-AOL users.

(Shameless plug time) The ISP I work for offers unmetered access for $17.95 per month, which includes unmetered access, 10MB of Disk Space, and three additional e-mail accounts. We have local dial-ups across California. Our tech philosophy is to give each customer our personal attention.

But, there are also ISPs which charge only $12.95. However, they are cutting corners someplace.

[John Corn]

Bob, AOL was my first provider, at that time it was terrible.
Whats good for you may not be so good for the rest of us, at that time I was into online gaming which was and still today is almost virtually impossible to do on AOL. Personally I didn't like it, but maybe some here do?...........

Zloth, Im sure it would make a good word processor, your certainly don't want to use it to surf the net.......unless you have plenty of time and patience. Scandisk, Defrag and emptying out the temp files made a world of difference on that machine.......

[Steve Mehs]

My IBM 100Mhz machine ran stable for many years, even thought it had 7 viruses on it at the same time.

[Bob Haller]

Thanks no I understand the anti AOL bias. I suffered thru the access problems too. MUCH better these days. Verizon DSL was a disappointment. Blah colors and lacking some AOL only content.

Must be lots of us who like AOL, I think its the biggest provider....

[John Corn]

There's no doubt AOL is the biggest and most popular.
I've had better luck with some smaller ISP's, until they grew to big. For nearly 2 yrs. I've had good luck with Mindspring/Earthlink, but the last month or so I've noticed my connection getting worse.
I've been thinking about possibly changing ISP's myself, I always hate changing email adresses......

[Mark Holtz]

Originally posted by John Corn
Zloth, Im sure it would make a good word processor, your certainly don't want to use it to surf the net.......unless you have plenty of time and patience. Scandisk, Defrag and emptying out the temp files made a world of difference on that machine.......

Nonesense. Up until last year, I was connecting to the Internet using a Pentium 166 on a dial-up. The biggest bottleneck was the connection, not the browser.

[Bogy]

Originally posted by Z'Loth


Nonesense. Up until last year, I was connecting to the Internet using a Pentium 166 on a dial-up. The biggest bottleneck was the connection, not the browser.

Right now I am at church in my office, on a 133 with a dial-up connection. It is really slow on a Saturday morning, but its not the computer that is slowing me down, its the connection.
At home I have 2 200MMX's, a 133, and a 75 networked on a cable modem. Again, the computers are plenty fast to surf the web, and normally the connection is fast, what slows it down are bottlenecks in the web. Personally, I think an extremely fast computer is wasted on the net. Until we get true broadband, most pentiums are plenty fast enough if what you want to do is word processing and surfing.

[Steve Mehs]

Personally, I think an extremely fast computer is wasted on the net. Until we get true broadband, most pentiums are plenty fast enough if what you want to do is word processing and surfing.

How true that it is. A friend of mine got a P4 2.2 GHz HP, and the most CPU intence program he uses is MS Power Point, that is a big waste of speed. Hell, I probably never use my full processing either. My 100Mhz PC works great, I even used to do some simple graphic editing on it with Paint Shop Pro. Proplem is clockspeed sells, I have no doubt Intel pushed their 1Ghz P3 before it was ready to hit the shelves, which was considered the most dissapointing chip, by the folks at Techtv. The semiconductor industry need to slow down and build effieient CPUs with decent cache management. And both Intel and Dell screwed themselves by using RDRAM.

[Brian Rector]

I have AOL and the Microsoft Network as my two service providers. I also did get another ISP very recently. However, I had to cancel that ISP subscription because all I got was disconnections every few seconds (the average disconnection rate with that ISP was 40-45 seconds/login). How many disconnections have I gotten with AOL and MSN? Zero.

[Bob Haller]

Agreed, processor speed is nearly meaningless on the web. No matter who the isp. I told a buddy of mine that who sunk 3.5K + into a 1.8 meg computer some 6 months ago. Top end dell... Its nice but his computer with cable modem is about the same as mine on dsl. Mne is733 meg.

He wasted his money but only buys the BEST stuff. Which is fine but in a few months I am going to get a new computer, intentionally one just a bit better than his. Just to irritate him.

He lived with NO computer for many years, his wife tries to keep his $ spending in check, sad when you only buy the best in his home he lives without lots of stuff.

I buy what will do the job......

[Kevin]

Up until last year, I had a sloooooooooow computer. Here's the specs:

AST Pentium 100mHz
28.8K modem
1.1GB hard drive space (Windows alone took up most of it)
16MB RAM

Now that computer sucked!

[Steve Mehs]

Sounds like my IBM, but I upgraded to 80MB of RAM (it actually came with 4MB) a and relaced the 28K modem with a 33K, not much difference but I got the modem for free.