ISP - Which is better than AOL?

Do you have no DSL or Cable service in your area? And, when you say that AOL freezes up, are you talking about web surfing from within their software? If you have to use them for a dial-up connection, just load the software, make the connection, and then minimize their app to get it out of the way... and then launch a web browser like Firefox on your desktop. It will piggy-back on AOL's dial-up connection, but not get you bogged down by their proxy servers and other layers. Give it a try.

AOL's browser app is bloated, buggy crap. Some of my relatives like AOL so when I visit them and use Firefox instead of the browser they're familiar with they're amazed at the difference in speed. But they're comfortable with the AOL browser and find Firefox, IE and other browsers less intuitive.

I'm satisfied with AT&T DSL service but don't use their apps for the same reason - bloated, sluggish PITA.

Yes, regular Dial-up. "Connecting at 45338 bps" or something like that with a US Robotics 56K.

Ok, will try that Firefox. Would that be as fast with IE as well (since it is loaded on here already)?

By the way, does anyone know why this computer's fan comes on loudly for a few minutes, the computer slows or freezes up and the little green "percentage of chip use" icon comes on in the bar on the taskbar?

any other option
depends on the quality of the company
Ours is the cable compoany, the local newspaper and a few othetr companies
so that aren't going to vanish
and the techs can be easily reached despite some things not being their problem
like when one pc cannot commect " thay cannot--not allowed to tell me-- how to fix it.
but a small company may even be willing to spend time or let you bring in the pc and make it work.
We use eudora a shareware mail program. not outlook.
we use firefox as a browser not internet explorer
people say internet explorer is very bloated
and that outlook has a lot of security holes.
it is necessary to use a virus scanner such as AVG and for BOTS ad-aware and spybot search and destroy and possibly a firewall such as zone alarm.
to use d/l from file hippo or c-net.
it is possible that AOL has built-in scanners.

Not unlike Lex, when I'd come home to visit Mom, I'd be stuck on her AOL dialup. It drove me nuts: a short trip under any circumstances. My only solution was to move back home two doors down from her. I networked her into my cable broadband and hooked her up with Firefox. She promptly made AOL her homepage.

More to the point, Tom, what's your system? Mom's still bogged down even on the broadband, but she's running a Pentium I or II with, probably, half a gig of RAM. Maybe its time for a system upgrade. At the very least, clean out your cookies and temp files and maybe defrag your hard drive. It might help your performance. Also, if you're going to hang with dialup, check your local phone provider. Most of them offer internet connection.

Wow. Film vs Digital. Canon vs Nikon. Now AOL vs NetZero.

Using a 2.8 Ghz. Celeron D with 256Mb. Have defrag.ed and clean out everything at every shutdown or restart.

Oh, it is always film and Nikon (and Pentax and Bronica and ).

With only 256mb of RAM I think you need an RAM upgrade. It cost me $40 to upgrade a 4 year old mid range Dell to 1GB of RAM and the improved performance is like day and night, even for simple things like web browsing.

From what I remember NetZero runs tons of ads, which bog down your internet experience.

If you go the Firefox on AOL thing that's the speed that just about any dialup is going to give you. If you want faster than that, look for inexpensive DSL or cable modem or.... Does AOL have high speed in your area? They should have a slow DSL (about 10 times faster than dialup) for not too much more than what your paying now.

When I tried AOL free for 30 days I cancelled well before that 30 days was up, but they kept charging me, but they'd do it every 90 days. I'd call and complain, they'd give me a confirmation number and say that it would never happen again and then 90 days later there's another debit from my account. I'd call and complain and give that confirmation number and they'd say "oh well that's not a cancellation number that was for some free service" that I never asked for and are now charging me since I didn't cancel that, then they'd give me another cancellation confirmation number. 90 days later here we go again. I eventually had to close my bank account as Wells Fargo wouldn't stop them from taking any money out of my account, even after I walked into a branch and told them what was going on. They said I authorized it once so they're authorized to charge me whenever they wanted. I don't bank with WF anymore.

yes I heard that horror story about never unhooking from AOL
we had a $6.00 account via a computer group affiliation . on top of out isp dial up
( minimize and the aol number was tcp/ip)
then run aol mail as we had published the aol adress for my wife's newsletter adress
at that ( ancient year) aol mail came thru scrambled) and my wife was getting nerwesletter
articles that required a lot of clean up.

eventually they dropped the AOL/Computer group affiliation and it was ended.
I was told by out bank that I would have to close out the account.
we also had moved 120 miles and the regular AOLK account we had before 1995 sort of vaporized.
we didn';t forward any business connections.
what can they do if you don't exist anymore?
we did have my daughter-in-law in another town use one of our accounts adresses.
maybe that confused them.

Tom, my point of veiw, is that any ISP is better than AOL, once you do cable you never go back! and if you change good luck getting rid of AOL, if you do go cable, or any ISP aol email and IM is free without the aol program running