Free ISP's Not On Your OS
Graham Harris

I am not even sure that this opus will percolate the Net/Web/email/Thing or whatever because I am sort of new to it. Not for the want of trying I might add. The Great Media out there - or in here - or wherever - has recently been vociferously trumpeting the benefits of becoming a member of the huge Net family. You may have noticed. I admit to being a somewhat cautious before making the step. Viruses, crippling bills and other assorted trash dripping into the system has been a constant nightmare. However, here I have sat with a Power Mac and awesome gigabytes of space for the last year thinking, “Well, maybe I should” and so I did. 

It was the launch of the freebie thing which tipped the old balance. Well, I expect we have all been tempted. Having sluiced my way through a mass of internet magazines to learn a thing or two (It would have been infinitely cheaper to have bought the book) I was merrily surprised to see a vast community of freebie ISPs all presumably panting to have me on board. If I had been a pc nerd they would have. I belong to that highly selective breed of Real Computer Owners the platform of which seems to have drifted away from this particular civilization.

The support for the Mac is, as you all must know, rare and spasmodic and free support a mere dream. Oh yes, I know about Current Bun and Virgin and I have heard vague rumours about BT’s freebie. I can’t comment on the latter because I have been unable to get my mits on a CD but the other two? Oh oh oh. 

The Bun loaded but then came up with some intellectually challenging comment regarding a wizard that should been in the front and seemingly unless I prepared to do something about loading the confounded sorcerer then registration was forbidden. Not wishing to be seen as a complete prat I tried loading it a second time but the number was out of order. Virgin loaded all right but then surreptitiously removed an extension. I was asked to find something called “OTUtilityLib” which no one in my closely knit community of Mac Worshipers had heard of. Using Sherlock (That’s “Find” for you pre OS 8 users) to try and find the thing proved to be useless because that also needed to have “OTUtilityLib”. The fact is that several minor applications on my system had suddenly gone kaput. Removing the Virgin virus was of no help, it presumably had taken the extension with it. The answer was to reinstall the program which then asked me if I wanted to have an OT extension because without it it couldn’t load. I agreed. It mysteriously found it and I recovered the extension and then got rid of Virgin.

Of course, nothing in this life is free. [Except, perhaps 1984 OnLine] One can always ring the Support team and at 50p a minute I assume that this is exactly what these freebie merchants want. I am not against anyone trying to earn the odd crust but this sort of deception tends to make the newcomer wilt. Of course it is not just the Mac user who has this problem. I have a friend who is, strange to say because he quite a nice fellow, a pc man and he has internetted via FreeServe and he had the same problem with them. 

Graham Harris
<gdetimms@AOL.com>