In computer news this week:

Evaulating your internet service with a 2nd opinion... AOL versus Earthlink

AOL claims 29 million users; Earthlink around 5 million. I presently have both services, and have been evaluating them against each other for 2 months. My long term frustration with AOL, bordering on hatred at times, finally caused me to evaluate another service I had heard was comparable in price and better in performance. The pricing of both is virtually the same.

Here's what I don't like about AOL.

1. Constant spamming - about 50% of my email is spam. Aol says they are doing everything they can about it, but they never fix the problem.

2. Constant freezes when I dial in. This means the phone rings, you hear the modem tones, and then you get a message saying "Connecting to network".

However nothing ever happens, and when I hit control alt delete I see that AOL is not responding, so I have to end the task.

In 1997 AOL had that huge problem of busy signals which caused them to be sued in every state when they only had about 6 million users. I suspect that perhaps now they let you connect to avoid the busy signal, but then you sit there and freeze because their service is overloaded.

3. Constant disconnects.

4. Horribly slow performance. During each AOL session I seem to spend minutes with the service not responding. I can click my mouse on a url dozens of times and nothing happens. Often I will get a message saying that the website I want is not available or overloaded.

5. Suspicions about their email. Sometimes I go for some suspiciously long periods without getting any email, not even any spam.

6. AOL uses a proprietary mail system that you have to use, and their own proprietary browser.

Here's a comparison of those dislikes with my Earthlink experiences todate.

1. Earthlink has a feature called Spaminator. I have never received one piece of spam on Earthlink, yet I have visited the exact same websites that I do on AOL.

2. I have had a few connection problems, but nothing like I have with AOL. Earthlink recently added another access number which has helped.

3. I have had some disconnects while online, but again a lot less. I am accessing both services via a dial up phone line, and I think some of this problem just might be the overloaded phone system.

4. Performance of Earthlink overall has been superior to AOL. I almost always connect at 50K. Again I have experienced some non-performance periods, but not as many.

I started experimenting whenever I got a "website not available" message on AOL, I would switch to Earthlink, and in all cases I could get right on that website in question, which means AOL was not letting me do that.

5. During periods of not getting any AOL email, last weekend I tried sending email to my aol account from my earthlink account. Out of 5 messages I sent at different times, I only received that last 2 in my AOL mailbox. This makes me nervous.

6. EL has their own proprietary browser and email - as simple to use as AOL's. However with Earthlink you have the option to use any email program you want, and any browser.

I will do a final review of these services in another month.

For Raw Bytes, this is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 Email: fdspokane@mtamicro.com