I had to laugh last night!

I was on the phone to a friend who was having internet connection problems like you do. Was speaking to her, asking her what AOL had asked her to do.

And one of the things they told her to do was to Defragment the hard drive!. At this point I was LMAO!!

Several hours on the phone later, I had the modem and everythnig working again, but was unable to connect to AOL using their dial up numbers, yet was able to connect to another ISP without any problems.

AOL today then told her to put comma's inbetween each of the numbers that were being dialled! Like thats going to sort out a handshake/authentication problem!

 

They got a little list on their wall that the 'monkeys' read off.

Item number 1 is usually replace the modem.

What's a chap of your esteem doin using AOHell? You'll be moving to MSN next

Yeah right!

 

That's why AOL is known as ******** On Line

 

The worst thing is......you don't even get a true internet connection with AOL!!! They conveniently forget to mention this to would be users.

I think they should have to declare this to all customers before they sign up.

 

Please explain Gedi ?

would love to know this

(a workmate has just signed up to them after my advise not to, hell what do i know )

Andy

 

err herm
I use AOL Broadband and have no problems so far
Don't like AOL's interface to much apart from music or video downloads
So use IE v6 for browsing and a little GUI to use transfer emails to and from Outlook

 

several hours?? lol (did you suggest a defrag too?)

BB

 

Knowing Ian several hours chatting up would be more likely

 

I dont I use Blueyonder with a nice proper ethernet connection to my router! none of this USB rubbish!

 

We were talking about other things besides the computer problems

 

... I betchaaaaa!!!

lol

 

Nails, lip gloss, men etc etc

 

>AOL today then told her to put comma's inbetween each of the >numbers that were being dialled! Like thats going to sort out a >handshake/authentication problem!

Its not as mad as it seems.. 2 comma's at the end of the phone number puts a 1 second delay before the modem at the users end tries to start negotiation. As all hardware seems to not follow strict rules of negotiation and timing.
Recently I was testing some Ericsson kit dial up chassis that my parents had been dialing upto for months without a problem.. after an IOS upgrade my parents could no longer connect. Turned out that the IOS upgrade had changed the timing on the authentication between the dial up chassis and their modem and after some guess work I realised that delaying the modems authentication by 1 sec fixed the problem.

Andrew

 

You are not given a ppp connection. You sit behind AOL's proxies on their private network.

This has many many disadvantages of which I will not go into here apart from the fact that AOL users will find that services that are available to users given a true connection will not be available to AOL users.

Why? because many system admins (me included) of anything from corporate networks to web site admins will block AOL (and similar) at the firewall. Its just not worth the hastle of tracking AOL users who may be annoyances as hundreds of users my be accessing the internet via the same proxy, thus the same IP address.

Unfortunatly, the legitimate users have to suffer because of the skript kiddies.

 

Loads of ISP's use proxys to cut down on bandwidth. Every customer on NTL uses their transparent caches without knowing it unless they manually set it themselves.

Simon.