I came home from work today and sat down at my computer like I normally do. I turned my monitors on and wanted to check on my downloads. For those of you who have no clue, I have dinosaur speed dial-up here. And don’t even bothering asking me why I don’t have broadband. I can’t get DSL where I live and my only cable modem option will cost me $76 a month. So, I stick with the dial-up, which leads me into this wonderful segue. Anyway, I have had MSN dial-up for about 3 years now. I can’t say that I hate it, but I can’t say that I’m trilled about it either–mostly the price and the lack of newsgroup access. I have tried other ISPs over the years in hope of shedding my $21.99 a month bill to the Evil Empire, but I haven’t liked any of the services. Either they would kick me off line too soon or they would have real shitty connection speeds. While it is true that MSN does tend to kick me off every 8 hours, I have my computer to automatically redial every 2 seconds once the signal is lost. Oh yeah, it’s also setup to do this 500 times. Ok, back to my point. Last week it was time to start shopping again for a new ISP. Christmas is coming and I was really hoping to shed my $21.99 bill. So I looked around online and read tons of review for about 4 hours, and finally decided on which one I was going to try. I went with the new Netscape ISP service for a nice $9.99 a month. At first, I was really put off by the whole ‘Netscape Toolbar’ that you need to use to dial in and stay connected with. But, after a few Google searches, I found a way around that (Hint: username@netscape.aol.com). After that, it was time to put this baby through the basic bane of all dial-up connection–large downloads. So, loading up eMule, I queued up a whole bunch of videos and let it sit overnight. When I got up the next day, quite a bit had transferred. So, I decided to just keep using it until I found something I didn’t like. Well, when I came home today, I saw something which had never happened before. When I checked to see how long I had been online since my last redial and how much had transferred, I saw this:
Never in my life have I ever been connected for over a day with a dial-up connection. I think my current record before this was like 10 hours, but 1 day and 8 hours is nuts!! Needles to say that if the connection continues to perform like this for the next 2 weeks or so, MSN will be getting dropped like 3rd period French.
