Towncrier
DIS Legend
- Joined
- Aug 23, 1999
- Messages
- 10,334
Let me preface this story by saying that I've never had AOL service, but I have on several occasions had to help my neighbor work through his AOL problems. The most recent event was the result of switching his home office DSL line from his work computer to his wife's computer. His wife's PC had been working fine with AOL 9.0 before the switch. But after adding the DSL modem software to her computer, AOL became very tempermental. My buddy spent 5 hours on the phone on Monday ping ponging back and forth between Alltel tech support and AOL tech support. I knew that it was an AOL issue because the DSL line was working fine when I ran speed tests on it and when I used Internet Exploder and Outlook Distress to access the internet.
To make a long story short, it turns out that his wife's computer has ONLY 127Mb of ram and that AOL 9.0 requires 128Mb in order to operate properly. Apparently it was just barely getting by before we loaded the Alltel DSL software on her computer. That was the final straw. After countless calls to AOL, my friend finally reached someone who diagnosed the problem and talked him through downgrading to AOL 8.0 until such time as he can add more memory to the computer. What drove my friend batty was the fact that the software worked just fine (or so he thought) the day before we hooked up his new DSL modem and that it never dawned on him (or me) that the addition of the DSL software would push the computer over the edge.
So be forewarned that if you are determined to run AOL 9.0 on your PC, make certain that you have AT LEAST 128Mb of RAM. You would probably be much better off to have at least twice that much memory in order to be safe. If your computer doesn't have that much RAM, stick with the older version of AOL.
To make a long story short, it turns out that his wife's computer has ONLY 127Mb of ram and that AOL 9.0 requires 128Mb in order to operate properly. Apparently it was just barely getting by before we loaded the Alltel DSL software on her computer. That was the final straw. After countless calls to AOL, my friend finally reached someone who diagnosed the problem and talked him through downgrading to AOL 8.0 until such time as he can add more memory to the computer. What drove my friend batty was the fact that the software worked just fine (or so he thought) the day before we hooked up his new DSL modem and that it never dawned on him (or me) that the addition of the DSL software would push the computer over the edge.
So be forewarned that if you are determined to run AOL 9.0 on your PC, make certain that you have AT LEAST 128Mb of RAM. You would probably be much better off to have at least twice that much memory in order to be safe. If your computer doesn't have that much RAM, stick with the older version of AOL.
