This site sets a record!

[Sikander]

I have never heard anyone but a neophyte have anything good to say about AOL, but the complaints about it are legion. It's crap, it's proprietary, it's expensive, and it's available in your town. Try another ISP, and you have a 98% chance of improving.

[Space05us]

Originally posted by King of Rasslin
AOL has actually been proven to be a reliable, if slightly expensive, ISP for people that don't have cable or DSL available where they live

Other ISPs are unreliable, AOL isn't going to go under like the 20,000 other ones since the tech companies all died. For an ISP in this economy, AOL is holding together very, very well in both its service and its company.

the only reason AOL is still in business is because it's targeted at dumb people.... er it's user freindly I mean. and there are a lot of people who prefer having "user friendly" systems.

[Boris Godunov]

AOL stays in business because it operates much like Bally's Total Fitness clubs. Hook in the newbies to expensive contracts, and rely on the dumb complacent ones who won't bother looking for anything better.

AOL stinks. There can be no contesting of this. Proven fact.

And even I, who am not quite so old, remember the Internet before AOL existed. God how I miss some of those BBSes...

[Dr Strangelove]

I dumped AOL over a year ago and I'm glad I did. My experience was very similar to Immortal Wombat's. I was forever getting kicked off. The little message boxes that pop up to tell you that the AOL server thinks you're idle and wants to know if you want to stay on line almost NEVER worked.

I started with AOL in 1995 just before they went to the unlimited service, They didn't even try to have enough servers to accomodate the increased traffic in place beforehand. For nearly 6 months I averaged a mere 2 or 3 hours on line a month because the servers were always jammed.

I didn't stay with AOL for so long because I'm stupid. The other main ISP in this town is a locally owned one run by the same people who custom made my first Pentium computer. On picking it up the tech who built it told me that if I had problems with it that weren't clearly hardware problems I should call Microsoft for help because he didn't know much about the Windows OS. ( The versions of Windows Microsoft sells to commercial computer builders explicitly states that the builder is responsible for providing service. ) Sometimes none of the choices is very satisfactory. That doesn't give a service provider an excuse for providing inadequate service.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I started with AOL in 1995 just before they went to the unlimited service, They didn't even try to have enough servers to accomodate the increased traffic in place beforehand. For nearly 6 months I averaged a mere 2 or 3 hours on line a month because the servers were always jammed.

I remember that... that is when my family told AOL to **** themselves and went to cable modem.

[MrFun]

I am an AOL member and I get kicked off about 12 times every month -- so it is not very often in my opinion.

And I like the way the chat system works in AOL, along with the Buddy List and Instant Message system.

[ixnay]

We had AOL, but I eventually convinced my mom to dump it and move to a local ISP. I think everyone is satisfied now. Except me, since I've been on a highspeed college network for a year and then come home to a 56K connection.

[Space05us]

I've never been booted from any ISP and all of mine have been local

[- Groucho -]

Originally posted by King of Rasslin
And what kind of college do you think I will be going to?

You either have an extremely easy but very cheap college that won't even have internet access or an expensive college where you have to study all the time anyway. If you spend all of your time playing games, you will fail. In the easy college, they won't bother to spend money on internet access because they know their students are going to be failures in the job market.

I went to a cheap Canadian college that is in constant budget crisis ... and it has high-speed internet access in every room. It's pretty much standard at most places.

And I have no idea where you got this "hard-working college" stuff from. I want proof that there even exists a college where guys don't blow off classes to play Counter-strike or Unreal Tournament or whatever the flavour of the week is. Even at law school guys would skip classes for recreational activities (though given that these were future lawyers that usually meant sleeping one off, but it's the same principal) and their grades wouldn't suffer dramatically. Just because you're serious about doing well doesn't mean you live like a monk.

And, just because it can't be said often enough, AOL sucks.

[King of Rasslin]

Echinda, you would feel guilty stopping to use the bathroom while in a college like Yale. All you ever do is study. It is your life. It is your goal. You don't play games. Your future is at stake. My cousin went to Duke University and told me how much she studied. Imagine Harvard.

If you plan to graduate from college with a C-, fine. But if you want to get into graduate school, you need to get some seriously high grades. And high grades are earned from hours of intense studying. I plan to succeed, so I will study all the time in college. And the internet in college dorms is to be used only for educational purposes.

[- Groucho -]

Originally posted by MrFun
I am an AOL member and I get kicked off about 12 times every month -- so it is not very often in my opinion.

And I like the way the chat system works in AOL, along with the Buddy List and Instant Message system.

Twelve times a month is not very good at all. When I used dial-up, I only got kicked off once a month or so (always in the middle of a huge download ). Also, though I don't use it, I thought AIM was available to non-AOLers as well. Is that wrong? If not, why put up with the bad parts of AOL if you can get the good parts for free?

[- Groucho -]

Originally posted by King of Rasslin
Echinda, you would feel guilty stopping to use the bathroom while in a college like Yale. All you ever do is study. It is your life. It is your goal. You don't play games. Your future is at stake. My cousin went to Duke University and told me how much she studied. Imagine Harvard.

If you plan to graduate from college with a C-, fine. But if you want to get into graduate school, you need to get some seriously high grades. And high grades are earned from hours of intense studying. I plan to succeed, so I will study all the time in college. And the internet in college dorms is to be used only for educational purposes.

Don't believe your cousin. I partied almost as much as I wanted, studied as much as I needed to, got good grades, went to law school, graduated near the top of my class and now work in a large NYC law firm surrounded by alumni of Harvard, Yale and other Ivy league schools. Sure, some of these folks lived, ate and breathed studying in college and law school, but not even close to all of them did. And the ones that did ... generally the clients find them a little odd.

So relax, get yourself a better ISP (because, AOL sucks) and brush up on your twitch reflexes. College isn't the hell you imagine.

[King of Rasslin]

If you are going to be a lawyer you have to memorize a big book of the various laws. This is about as thick as 3 to 4 bibles, and even more confusing. My dad was a lawyer and told me how difficult it was. The BAR exam (whatever it stands for) is the hardest test he has ever taken in his life. He has dozens of horror stories from college.

Interestingly enough, women study more than we do. Their grades are accordingly higher. I actually looked into this. Almost all of the girls in my class had at least a B average. 40% of the guys are failing. The girls studied and the guys didn't. Hmm. I am probably one of the only guys that studies in my class, and my grades prove it. I haven't made a B this whole year

College is all about getting higher grades than the other guys. You do want to make graduate school, don't you? You do have to get into law school right after college, what a nightmare.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by King of Rasslin
Echinda, you would feel guilty stopping to use the bathroom while in a college like Yale. All you ever do is study. It is your life. It is your goal. You don't play games. Your future is at stake. My cousin went to Duke University and told me how much she studied. Imagine Harvard.

I'm sitting with a Duke student who just graduated this past year. He says you are full of it. He had plenty of time to enjoy himself and party, and constantly goofed off on the internet. The only people who may be like that are the engineering students, he says. So it's not where you study, it's what you study.

Oh, and George W. Bush went to Yale, and he spent all of his time drinking and snorting coke. Now he's the frickin' President of the United States. Shows what you know!

[Mr. Nice Guy]

IT'S A Y2K COMPUTER BUG!!!