BlueLight- Lightning In A Bottle? Try Molasses!
Written: Oct 11 '00 (Updated Oct 11 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Free
Cons: Consumer of resources
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| rpllingrock's Full Review: BlueLight.com |
Brought to us by our friends at K-Mart and Yahoo!, this free internet service with a rather extensive line up of dial-up numbers covering over 95% of the US, has improved their service but not to the point where I would consider it as a back-up ISP.
This was my second attempt in four months to get this service to work correctly. On my first attempt I failed to keep my system running for longer than fifteen minutes before forcing me to manually restart.
Setup and Installation
The download is quite hefty at 2.6 Megs but if you'd like you can order the CD for free. Yet another choice allows you to download the dialer in smaller chunks to fit on floppies.
I chose the download and the installation went fine with one exception. For some strange reason I had to setup the dialer to recognize my modem. It had set it on a connection device that doesn't even exist on my system! Strange indeed!
Signing up to the service consisted of your name, address and phone number. Of course let's throw in a handful of marketing questions and you're on your way. Anything noted with a red "Y" signifies that the information provided in these input boxes will be shared with Yahoo!.
Your e-mail services will be provided by Yahoo!, no slouch on the e-mail frontier! Their web-based client is by far the easiest to use and navigate. With 6 Megs of space you'll find this ample for most applications.
What's Been Changed
Most notably was the dialer that ran a short commercial for K-Mart while dialing into the service. It has been removed thankfully. Another change is the square ad bar. The new ad bar is more consistent with other free providers. It can be floated or docked, top or bottom, and is similar in size to ad bars on AltaVista and FreeLane or about 1/6 of your screen.
Connection Success and Rate
Well below what I've come to expect from my paid provider SNET. At times it took as long as fifteen minutes to connect using a main number and two back-ups. When finally connected, the rate could range from the mid 20's to as high as 48K bps.
Total throughput seemed to lag even though connected at a fairly high rate. This was tested downloading a single 570 KB file from a web site using Bluelight and SNET. On SNET the average rate at a connection of 48K averaged between 3.8 and 4.1 KB per second.
With Bluelight, the same file read 1.8 to 3.4 KB per second. The connections were at the same speed but the transfer rate was not. The fact that the ad banner is also using the connection may have contributed to the reduction of transfer.
Also take into consideration the times of day and the amount of net traffic after looking at the transfer rates above.
Bottom line. Don't plan on doing any online gaming with this ISP unless it's checkers! ;)
Problems Galore!
There was a consistent problem with verification of my username and password during logon to the Bluelight network. After countless retries at logon, I added another account only to have it happen again a few days later. Whether this was a temporary problem with Spinway or something local on my machine, I'll never know since several contacts to support went unanswered.
Another problem I encountered was my Yahoo! mail being disabled for security reasons by Yahoo! for reasons not known or explained. If I logged in with my regular ISP the account was active and enabled.
Shutting down Bluelight sometimes failed to restore my system to normalcy. Although better than in the past, it still hung up to the point where a Ctrl-Alt-Del was in order to eliminate the Spinway banner ad from the "close program" dialog box. In the past I would sometimes have to restart by resetting the computer manually. Not good!
It seems that many of the previous problems were corrected to a degree, only to be replaced by other more persistent problems.
There Had To Be Some Good?
Outside of the free Yahoo! Mail, there isn't much to speak of. You can get the free e-mail account regardless of Bluelight membership. The ad bar consists of mainly advertisement driven content. This is not always the case with other free providers. Sure they dump you off on a news page with ads flashing, but you did get the news or sports scores you were seeking. This is not always the case with Bluelight. Unless of course you consider shopping at K-Mart online a worthy news item! ;)
Overall
This is one ISP that I would steer clear from. Too many little problems were encountered during the time I used this service. The ad bar itself would sometimes cause other parts of my operating system to falter, which resulted in a less than desirable experience.
Too much time was spent trying to figure out what programs I was running in the background could be causing problems with Bluelight. If I shutdown certain programs it seemed to balance out and allow me to stay connected and run my browsers without many tribulations.
I can't imagine anyone getting any real use from this ISP, but after reading some of the reviews here on Epinions, some have little if any trouble at all. For me though it just didn't cut it.
Recommended:
No
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