davidh
August 9th, 2006, 01:39 PM
I signed up for a free AOL account.
I wanted to try out their free security programs.
I could not get the AOL 9 software to run reliably on my Win 98 PC. IIRC I also had problems with AOL 7 in the past. Only AOL 5 would run reliably on this PC.
AOL 9 left A LOT of junk on my PC when I uninstalled it. With a lot of effort and the aid of the now obsolete type of software called UNINSTALLER and also a REGISTRY CLEANER I wiped out most of it. I do not recommend this approach to anyone else. Safer to just leave the junk.
The AOL web mail seems significantly slower performing than Yahoo free web mail.
AOL still has forums and they are now all web based but NOT Propero. They also support RSS. However the AOL forums (message boards) seem even more hidden in AOL than the Compuserve forums are on Netscape.
Perhaps the only feature of AOL that I will use is their free 100 MB storage for web pages or blogs. AIM users get free blogs too, but maybe not web pages? However it requires SFTP (secure FTP) apparently not supported by some common FTP programs?
AOL is also going to offer free 2 GB storage, I think.
But from what I've heard, AOL innovation was too slow and too stupid to stay up with the curve and they are so far behind now that they may well never catch up. So I would not be surprised if somebody buys AOL in the not distant future. Time Warner and AOL managers fought so much they could not do what was needed.
DH
I wanted to try out their free security programs.
I could not get the AOL 9 software to run reliably on my Win 98 PC. IIRC I also had problems with AOL 7 in the past. Only AOL 5 would run reliably on this PC.
AOL 9 left A LOT of junk on my PC when I uninstalled it. With a lot of effort and the aid of the now obsolete type of software called UNINSTALLER and also a REGISTRY CLEANER I wiped out most of it. I do not recommend this approach to anyone else. Safer to just leave the junk.
The AOL web mail seems significantly slower performing than Yahoo free web mail.
AOL still has forums and they are now all web based but NOT Propero. They also support RSS. However the AOL forums (message boards) seem even more hidden in AOL than the Compuserve forums are on Netscape.
Perhaps the only feature of AOL that I will use is their free 100 MB storage for web pages or blogs. AIM users get free blogs too, but maybe not web pages? However it requires SFTP (secure FTP) apparently not supported by some common FTP programs?
AOL is also going to offer free 2 GB storage, I think.
But from what I've heard, AOL innovation was too slow and too stupid to stay up with the curve and they are so far behind now that they may well never catch up. So I would not be surprised if somebody buys AOL in the not distant future. Time Warner and AOL managers fought so much they could not do what was needed.
DH