My ISP just got less anoying...

It is a shame and a disgrace for a geek like me to still use the officialy worst ISP ever - AOHell. I really need to get myself broadband connection... Actually, if it was just up to me I would have it 3 years ago. But unfortunately I do not live alone, but with two other people who require internet connection. With just 2 phone lines, 3 computers, 2 printers a and 1 scanner it would seem that getting cable modem, a little router and setting up a local network would be an ideal solution...

Well, it is not. Even though everyone agrees that this would be the best, no one is willing to actually do anything about it. And I certainly do not want to fund the internet connection for 3 people from my own packet... So, I'm still on AOL... The software is horrible, buggy and eats up resources - but the connections are somewhat decent so I never really bothered to look for other dialup ISP. What is the point - I keep telling myself - we will be getting broadband soon so why even bother swichting dialups.

So I have put up with anoying AOL software for years now... I usually minimize that horrible bloated piece of bugware and send it to the 4th desktop immidiately after logging in so that I do not have to deal with it. And up untill now there was no way around it - you had to do it this way, and waste your resources - the dialer was intergrated into the browser, so closing the window was killing your connection.

And since I do not care about AOL software I actually skipped 2 version upgrades. I figured - these things just get more and more bloated and have nothing I need. I just want the freaking dialer and that's all. And it seems that AOL actually did separate the dialer from the browser in their latest version! I was totally oblivious to this fact, untill I accidentally stumbled upon a random comment about it on some message board.

I immidiately raced toward the junk mail pile, found an AOL cd which I havent thrown out yet and installed it. And lo and behold- there is a separate dialer. Now this little thing sits in my task bar and I feel like I'm using a real ISP! Wohoo! I never thought I would say this, but they finally did something that makes sense!

First time in my life I have upgraded to actually get rid of features and bloat. Do not ask me what is new in the new version because I do not care - I'm never opening that crappy bloat ever again! lol

Now, if AOL would only get their IMAP service to be fully compliant with the standards (so that I can run email filters on my mail) that would almost make it almost a real ISP.