My mom has NetZero installed on her computer. Now, you have to know, NetZero uses advertisements all over to make prices for their premium customers lower. We pay $10 a month (I think) for the ads to not take up 10% of the screen while connected. Despite this, we still get ads while connecting and disconnecting, and now, while disconnected, it is asking to dial up to connect to cnn.com. I am not the only one with this problem, but NetZero support is just brushing my inquiry off. I even went as far to search for and find the string “cnn.com” within their own exec.exe, a file that is installed and runs with NetZero. They are brushing me off, so I’m thinking it doesn’t make sense to pay anything to have this bad software installed on our computer. Do I keep trying to fight with support, or do I give and leave the situation as it is (the computer requesting to dial out every 3-4 seconds to connect to cnn.com) or do we get DSL from our phone provider?
Depending on your area, DSL can actually be cheaper. We had NetZero since they were actually free for their service and I know how annoying it is for those ads, but if you are paying $10 a month, you shouldn’t have them any more. Anyways my point is that we are paying $5 extra a month and getting 2.5mb down and 1mb up which is real sweet! Other than that ad though, we had no problem with NetZero the 7 years we had it.
I might be wrong about dialup, but I don’t think you should need any software for a dialup (or DSL) connection. If you have the phone number, username, and password, you can connect using the operating system.
When we got DSL, Verizon sent a setup CD, but it didn’t only help configure the connection, it installed help center software, an IE toolbar, and probably some spyware. The computer doesn’t really need any of that for you to plug into the modem and directly configure the connection.
You have to check to see if DSL is even available right where you are. There’s a distance limitation with it. Just because someone has it down the road from you doesn’t mean the phone company will offer it to you. This happened to me since I’m in a “fringe area” the phone company wouldn’t provided DSL to me when I looked into getting broadband.
My broadband is thru the cable company. The price is higher though, I pay $45 a month. I’m overall happy with it and they only gripe I have is the loss of the signal (and the ability to get online) during rainstorms that last awhile. It’s all underground utilities in my area so it seems water gets in somewhere and causes problems until it dries out. The cable company has been out here several times and has never been able to fix it.
Yes and no. I can make the connection, but NetZero’s software “calls home” to their server so they know if you aren’t using their client–I am disconnected if I am not using their software. Yes, this is retarded, but then again, so is dialup.
Other than that ad though, we had no problem with NetZero the 7 years we had it.