It's Free so what did you expect?
Written: Oct 19 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: FREE, allows use of the phone while surfing, easy installation, good debugging wizard
Cons: Unpredictable hangs, connections and wildly variable voice quality
|
|
|
| cok's Full Review: Net2Phone |
My family is all long distance so when I heard about free phone calls I decided to jump at the chance. The first problem to solve was obtaining the software. I had a friend that had downloaded Yahoo Messenger and said that it worked. I had him email me the software and I went to work from there.
Yahoo has done an excellent job of packaging their software so the setup was a snap and they used Net2phone for the backend. As I ran the executable sent to me I did notice that it snuggled right into the execute and stay resident portion of my system so I decided to see how difficult it was to boot it out of there. Fortunately Yahoo has decided to play nice and messenger unloads easily after asking if it can stay and play.
Next was the call setup, after dashing down to Kmart and picking up a cheap headset with microphone I plugged in the head set into my sound card matching the sound out and mic icons with the well labeled headset jacks. I proceeded to click on the telephone icon in the Messenger service. Up came an install wizard and without any pain I followed the menus straight through and fired up my first call.
First problem, the whole thing went blank for about 3-5 minutes. For some reason I didn’t let my inherent lack of patience get the best of me and start pounding on the mouse or keyboard and was finally rewarded with a ring. A couple of rings later and bingo my Mom answered and after bellowing out a couple of hello’s we had a pretty good conversation going. Tip number one. Use the volume control on the calling screen it works pretty good and the people on the other end of the line will not go deaf from you shouting over the line.
Second problem. The quality of the transmission is not very good. It ranged from popping and pauses to some weird echoes and odd voice transmission. The received transmission is not much better, echoes, delays and some very strange talking into a tunnel effect made the conversation a bit difficult but not tedious or impossible. Which leads me to Tip number two. If your speakers have a head set jack leave the speakers plugged in and pickup a set of those ear bud speakers plug them into the speakers headset jack and then use the volume control on the speakers and avoid having to plug and unplug the speakers. It has the added benefit of almost completely eliminating the transmitted echo.
Third problem. After using the software several times I ran into one other rather nasty problem. Dropped calls or calls that don’t go through. As I suspected when things get busy you run into timeout problems and calls are either dropped or long pauses that cause the person you called to think the call is dropped. If a call goes for more that the 3-5 minutes before a connection is established you’ll likely get some weird service unavailable error. My solution to that problem was to just keep redialing. Which leads me to a third tip. Tell the person your calling that your on a very strange connection and that it is prone to hang-ups. Tell them that if they think the call has stopped strangely wait 20 seconds and just hang up. Once they know the calls are free they will learn to hang up quickly and wait for you to call back. Most of the calls will hang up in the first minute or two. I had this happen as much as 5-10 times before a good connection was established. Once you get a good connection you’re usually able to gab your brains out and hang-up normally.
My overall impression was that if I was paying for this I’d be furious, but for free it’s well worth doing. You’ll need a bit of patience and explanation to those that you are calling and explain to them that you’re too cheap to call them on a good quality regular line. That limits your calls to family and friends. I’d avoid any business calls to clients or associates unless they have the patience of Job or you are their boss.
Last tip, the software is very easy to down load and Yahoo makes it relatively painless to install. The URL to obtain the software is: http://messenger.yahoo.com/
Give pc2phone a try, the price is right, even though you get what you pay for...
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
cok
|
|
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 3 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.