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Tuesday, 28 January 2003 06:00![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pneRats, my computer just crashed again when dialling up to the Internet. Maybe it's the dialler I use rather than the memory.
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Dialler
Date: Tuesday, 28 January 2003 06:31 (UTC)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.)