Friday, December 10, 2004

DSL Hell

For Christmas, my hubby got us DSL and I just installed it yesterday. As with everything, there is a painful learning curve. The nice thing about DSL is that its fast and presumably people can reach me by phone even while I'm blogging (of course, I don't want to be interrupted even by my children, why I'd want to take a phone call is beyond me...)

Anyway, we got DSL through Verizon and it comes with MSN. We plan to close our AOL account by the end of the month so I'm currently trying to set up new e-mail accounts. Of course, I'm confused as to whether I should be setting up verizon accounts or msn, or both. On top of that, just as I figure out one thing, I start to get errors. For instance, I set up our primary e-mail account (for those of you who use that, the name is the same but its now @verizon.net and/or @msn.com -- I've set up both). Okay, fine, now for the other accounts, such as where I get my digests for the homeschooling yahoo groups in which I'm a member. Can't do it, it won't let me, I go through the whole set up and get an error message. I don't know why...it claims to have internal errors. I have internal errors, get over it.

Well, I set up unclimber1@msn.com for my blog e-mail and comment notices. This should be a smooth switch, if you want to e-mail me and don't know my other accounts, just go to my profile and click on e-mail and that should work.

The biggest pain -- these brightly colored, fast moving pop-up ads. I try to turn them off, but it doesn't seem to work. The nice thing about DSL, apparently, is that even when I'm not on-line, I can get the annoying pop-ups. I try virus scan and spyware scan but Internet Explorer has it in for me. I don't even know why thats on our machine, I don't use it to my knowledge, though it seems I might need it in the background to do something (sort of like a husband, but like a husband, I'm finding it more annoying than useful).

Anyway, this whole DSL experience is the best preventative for divorce and remarriage. Remarriage is probably like upgrading your system, you think it will be better and faster and you'll get more use out of it. Sure, it starts out bright and fast and then you realize its more trouble than its worth and you really liked how the old system worked better.

6 comments:

Unknown said...

I agree. High speed is much more vulnerable to nasties so keep your firewall and anti-virus up-to-date. Consider turning off the power to your modem when you're not on-line.

But you will LOVE the higher speed. Speed is seriously addictive.

Have fun surfing.

Larry Clayton said...

Welcome to DSL. Don't falter; it's great.
DSL/Dialup is like Typerwriter/Computer.

I got along quite well with my dialup until we visited Rob (and Ryan!!!) in July. Oh my! I couldn't wait. It came up in a breeze. No problems, Marjorie, none!

I hate to be a know-it-all, but try Linux. It's practically free to begin with, and you can stop subsidizing that money-hog like I did.

Well, I'm probably being impractical, but if by any chance you should want to give it a try, write for further instructions.

Fondly,

Larry

Marjorie said...

You all are wonderful! Thanks for the tips and compassion. I didn't realize I had such a tech support community out there.

Anne, I do have XP, thanks for the info about the need for a firewall.

Larry, I've only heard the word Linux, I know nothing about it...I'll start researching

Pixy Misa said...

Linux is great, but it's a big jump to make all at once.

For now, though, hop on over to Mozilla and download the Firefox browser. It's free and it's wonderful, and it stops pop-ups in their tracks.

Marjorie said...

Wow...this feels so beyond me. At least it might explain why I haven't been able to comment on blogger recently. I've recently heard of Firefox, that takes a bit of handling, also, doesn't it?

Pixy Misa said...

No, Firefox is really really easy to install and use. And it's small and fast and cute and furry and... Uh, strike that last one.

It's only a 4.7MB download, and doesn't effect anything else on your computer, and no pop-ups! Really, no pop-ups at all. Kills 'em dead. :)