In computer news this week, 05/09/2001

Turning out the lights on AOL, or the leaving your ISP checklist:

Changing your Internet Service Provider has become a fact of life in today's computer society. As faster internet options emerge, internet users have been seeking high speed connections.

The two current fast connections in our area are DSL and cablemodem. But the problem is that neither service is available everywhere in our area. You have to check based on your address. One time I called an 800 phone number in a newspaper advertisement on local DSL availability, and it took them 15 minutes to finally tell me I couldn't get it. "Where you callin' from? Spokain? Is that near Seattle? You saw our ad in a newspaper in Spokain? You sure, boy? " Yesterday I went straight to the internet to check on availability for AT&T High-Speed Cable Internet for one of my clients, and we had our answer - yes - in two minutes.

Regardless of what ISP you switch to, it's a hassle leaving your existing one, and here's my checklist of what you have to do.

1. I think it's worth it to try a new ISP while keeping your present one at least for a few months, which I did. That might cost you an extra $ 40 or so, but I think it's worth it to really check out the performance.

2. Then at least a month in advance, you want to start notifying people that you are changing your email address, and you need to contact everyone in your address book that you regularly correspond with. This give you ample time to make sure you are receiving their email at your new email address, and to gently remind those who you informed but who still keep sending to your old email address.

3. Then you need to convert your old email address book over to your new one. If you can get everyone to respond at your new address, then you can simply save them and thus automatically build your new address book. However, for those people who only go online once a month, or maybe once a year, you have to do those manually. One of the disadvantages of using AOL is that they keep their email addresses and webpage favorite places in a proprietary format. You can export them, but these exported files can only be read by the current or newer versions of AOL, not other ISP programs.

4. You need to convert over your favorite places. There is a way to automate this process somewhat. You can convert your AOL favorite places by opening AOL and then Internet Explorer at the same time, go to each of your aol favorite places in the AOL browser, copy the url or website address - switch into explorer and paste it - go to that site - and then save it as a favorite place in Explorer. This assumes you will be using Explorer as your browser in your new isp service. You could do the same thing with Netscape browser, or whatever browser your new services uses. This eliminates you having to do a lot of typing and manual conversions.

5. If you have a webpage, you need to change your hosting and transfer all your files.

6. And finally, you need to call your old isp and cancel your service.

Free at last, until I change ISP's again, which I know I will be doing sometime.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

POB 222 Spangle, Wa 99031 (509)245-3736 624-7230