(no subject)

[pne]

Rats, my computer just crashed again when dialling up to the Internet. Maybe it's the dialler I use rather than the memory.

Comments

[timwi.livejournal.com]

What dialer are you using, anyway? Is it a standalone piece of software, like the AOL or T-Online things? If so, is there any particular reason why you prefer these over Windows' built-in RAS dial-up networking? As for myself, I've downloaded and installed a PPPoE driver that allows me to use DSL with this built-in dialling-up software.

Dialler

[pne.livejournal.com]

I use 'Net Pal (http://www.kburra.com/npal.html), which was recommended to me quite a while ago.

I don't know "the AOL or T-Online things", but the main reason I prefer it over the built-in Dial-Up Networking is that it can redial until the connection is established. (And it can also calculate charges if you tell it how much each minute costs.)

When I still had a modem, another nice feature was to repeat dialling until a certain connection speed was reached, that way I could try a couple of times hoping I'd get more than 30K connects, which sometimes happened. (Now, with ISDN, I always connect at 64K, of course.)

That's mostly it, I guess. It also tells me what IP address and hostname I was assigned, though that's not so vital, and it has all the connections in one place so I can click on one, though I could make a shortcut to the Dial-Up Networking folder and get a similar result. It also saves passwords, but then so does DUN.

I guess it's mostly for the redialling. Though to tell the truth, that's been most useful on Sundays when I use a different Internet provider (thanks to XXL's free calls to "normal" phone numbers); the provider I use on weekdays is nearly always available. And for Sundays I have a backup provider that's nearly always available, too.

Perhaps it's simply habit now.

(Oh, and it'll also automatically reconnect if the connection gets dropped. That's come in handy a couple of times as well. Probably only important for monster downloading sessions, though, since usually I'm online for less than half an hour at a go, and often only for five minutes or so, then I disconnect and dial up again later.)