Newer is not necessarily better...

Ok I'll admit it. I have AOL, and not the freebie one. Before we entered the online world I had carefully researched the various Internet Providers and concluded that for lots of reasons (waaay back then) AOL was going to be "it". Well, it's many years later and yes, we still have AOL. I don't quite dare go to the free version not only because you just know it's not going to be *free* forever, but also because I don't like the way it manages my email or allows ME to manage/create it.

You may think me nuts for hanging onto it, but it's been so user friendly and intuitive, plus as I don't read print newspapers, I get all my main and world news online. I have my AOL set to point me in the direction of my personal interests in addition to the headlines and other intriguing things and I can take it from there. And I can keep up in a conversation with anybody who reads any newspaper and often have tidbits of info that they don't know about.

Yes, I love my Google Chrome browser and my Mozilla Foxfire and frequently will exit AOL to use these to access the internet after I'm done with mail and catching up with news. Love the speed and the ability (with Google Chrome) to save the places/pages I most often go to so I can just click on them and boom.....I'm there.

This computer has Vista for its OS and of course, periodically AOL upgrades its software for "newer, faster, better" and sometimes, it's actually been a good thing. However, when AOL 9.5 came out in beta, man was that some bad stuff. It would continually stop working and run very slowly which made no sense as this is a very fast machine with tons of RAM. Yes, I know AOL runs every little thing through various filters and such which would result in slowing it down, but I no longer even use their anti-virus "security suite" once they discontinued it as part of your subscription. As we have cable access, I have the anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-anything bad stuff through our cable provider which CONSTANTLY updates it. So, when AOL 10 appeared, I uninstalled my clunky 9.5 and thought "NOW we're going to get something good!" and installed AOL 10.

Friends, unless you have microscopic vision and also enjoy torture, DON'T DO IT!!!! Talk about frustration. Yes AOL 10 was fast. But the way the email program worked was just plain crazy! Loony! Two different "saved mail" folders? I tried to adapt and learn, really I did. Soon I thought I'd get the hang of this "tabbed browsing" lunacy, but no. So just a little while ago I went through the exercise of uninstalling AOL 10 and searched for an older version which would run on Vista. Let me tell you, they do not make this easy, especially if you have Vista or Windows 7. Finally I was left with the option of going back to 9.5 which is now thankfully out of beta. I said a little prayer and installed it hoping that it would load pages faster and not be "unresponsive" causing me to have to shut it down and start over.

So far, so good. It was wonderful to see my email the way I used to see it, create and manage it. That in itself was worth the FOREVERNESS it took to download and install. Just why is that, anyway? But after all that, I've got it back.

Just another example of newer is not necessarily better........