Don Feinberg wrote:
This is
hardly a reason to use AOL. If keeping your bookmarks with you is so
very important, then put a copy of them on a thumb drive.
Better advice
The
answer to the poster's problem really is simple, but constantly ignored
by 99.44% of the world: BACK YOUR DATA UP. MASS STORAGE IS NOT
"FOREVER". DISKS EVENTUALLY
CRASH. (rarely, but eventually).
I guess rarely is subjective. While I didn't replace a
hard drive daily while carrying a tool bag for IBM for forty years, I
did replace a number of them. I probably replaced more hard drives
than any other component. Hard drives had the largest number of
installed devices so that would explain the number of replacements. As
time went on we replaced fewer since while the number increased, the
technology got better and a lot more reliable. If memory serves me
right, I retired two years ago, one array had a minimum configuration
of 32 hard drives.
Customers also bought large tape "arrays" that were capable of many
terabytes of storage for backup. Most had provisions for off site
secure storage of the individual tapes.
AOL is
so functionally substandard in almost every way, is so technically non
standard, and puts its tentacles down in places where you would never
expect to see them. It almost takes on a life of its own once
installed, and it is VERY difficult to
uninstall. (And if you try to uninstall it, it will tell you that it
did uninstall, but it in fact does not uninstall. Instead, it leaves a
huge numbers of settings, ini files, registry entries, ..., for you to
find and remove by hand.)
When we first got ThinkPads some of my co-workers
installed the 'free' trials of AOL. They discovered that they could
not access our intranet. The fix was usually a total format of the hard
drive and a complete reload of the work applications. It just proved
the old saying, "There are no free lunches"
Perhaps
one of the most egregious problems is that AOL locks you into webmail
in the AOL domain and deliberately doesn't allow POP3 mail. This means
that once you have and use an AOL mail address, you are obligated to
use AOL via the web to get your mail (whether via browser or AOL's mail
client is not of consequence). Now: think about changing your
provider. 30 bazillion people already know you as zork123@xxxxxxx. Now you want to get POP3 mail from your
new provider. How do you download your old AOL mail using the same
process? Answer: you don't. You still need to get your AOL mail by
web access.
I cannot
see any reason why anyone would use AOL for any purpose, when better
and safer software which does everything AOL does and more is available
freely or nearly freely. (Unless, that is, you support paying your
money for watching infomercials and advertisements in their "portal".)
And,
oh: back your data up.
Don
Feinberg
Bob
--
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( O O )
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I plan to live forever. So far, so good......
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