Fed up with aol - can anyone recommend an ISP?

[wilbur]

Does anyone have a good ISP that they're happy with? I want to be able to use MS Outlook for my email and Internet Explorer for surfing. I don't have broadband yet, but may do in the next year. I want unlimited dial-up for about £15 per month, and perhaps the option to have a little webspace in case I ever get organised and set up a family web-page. Any ideas?

try tiscali

Why are you fed up with it, wilbur? (Just curious. Before we had broadband it used to crash on me all the time but is OK now - unless I try to download a PDF thing when it does it but sulks afterwards and then falls over.)

Freeola is good - \link{www.freeola.com\Freeola

Yeah, but my linking isnt

www.freeola.com

if you are considering broadband in the future, you may want to check here

Blueyonder(Telewest). I find them very quick and reliable.

Tiscali helpline is useless at weekends and staffed by unintelligent and unhelpful folk IME.
Good on price though.

I must say the free helpline with aol is one of the reasons I'm reluctant to switch.

Thanks for the recommendations, I'll look into them. Janh - I'm fed up partly because the aol software seems to crash a lot (although that may just be my old computer), and also because I can't bank with Natwest online using aol and have to open IE anyway. Mainly though, it's because incoming emails get filed away instead of sitting in your inbox until you can deal with them. I work part time and so on my work days I have to go searching back through my filing cabinet to retrieve work emails which is a real. Plus I often forget I got an email and it never gets answered. Maybe aol is better for organised people who deal with their emails straight away .

That should read, "a real pain" !

wilbur, my emails sit in my inbox until I read them - is it a personal setting? Hang on a tick.......not sure. Just went to AOL Preferences and there is "Retain all mail I read in my PFC" - I have that unset, and if I want to keep something I have read in my inbox I click on "keep as new" at the bottom (while it's highlighted) - otherwise they go to Old Email for a week. Unread (New) email stays put until I read it though (for 4 weeks I think). What version are you on? (We have 7 - I'm pretty sure it worked the same with earlier versions though.)

I do send things to PFC when I want them later, and agree it's hard to find them then because the dates are all mixed up but not as hard as it would be if everything went!

We also had a very old PC along with non-broadband AOL when ours used to crash a lot. Are you likely to get new PC as well as broadband when you get it?

I don't know how AOL's crash rate compares with other ISPs...I agree with Tinker about AOL's online helpline, their techies seem pretty knowledgable and you might find the devil you know is better than the rest!

My biggest problem with AOL is that I can't get their unlimited service - I only get 30 hours for the same price.

wilbur - I use Natwest online banking all the time. I have it set as my home page on IE, so I log on to AOL and then start up IE. I actually quite like it cos I can be reading Mumsnet whilst I wait for my Natwest pages to load and just toggle between the 2 windows with ALT+tab

And like JanH I find that my unread mail stays in my inbox for at least a month.