No. And that is saying something, since I really hate AOL (check out my profile page). I have had several problems with FreeWorld that, had I not been motivated by desire to experience the unknown world of free ISPs, would have caused me to delete it immediately.

Let's talk about first things first. I saw an ad for FreeWorld and went to the website, I downloaded it fast and without a hitch. So far so good. I double-click the icon on my desktop, and up pops the installation box. I install it. So far so good.

Next step: creating a new account. Impossible! I click connect, it connects, an advertising toolbar pops up, then I wait. And wait (reminds me of cooking a baked potato in an oven). Finally, AOL popped up and started trying to dial. So I closed AOL. FreeWorld opened AOL right back up. I closed AOL. FreeWorld and I played this game for ten minutes, and I finally moved AOL to the recycle bin. Problem solved, right? No AOL to initialize, and FreeWorld will move on. Not so. Next I get a dialog box asking me to type in the location of AOL.exe.

I went into MS-DOS prompt and did a little switching around, basically making FreeWorld think that Internet Explorer was actually AOL. So FreeWorld opens Internet Explorer and tries to go to this website:

http://-u"http://freeworld.excite.com/freeworld/tc.dcg"

but said website doesn't exist. Finally, I closed FreeWorld and the twenty I-can't-locate-AOL-because-I-am-retarded-and-don't-know-that-I-am-not-supposed-to-need-AOL-to-run dialog boxes (that's a mouthful), and I reinstalled AOL. I signed on to AOL and went to:

http://freeworld.excite.com/freeworld/tc.dcg

where I manually registered for FreeWorld. Next I close AOL and log onto FreeWorld. Yay! installation and registration is finally complete (if you had a hard time following what all I had to do, imagine how I felt). So, I am finally done. Granted, FreeWorld wasn't very user-friendly, but I could get over that. Like I said, I liked the idea of not having to pay for the internet.

So I log onto FreeWorld and open Internet Explorer. Well, guess what! FreeWorld is SLOW! Majorly slow, mucho slow, slow in bold and italics. Slow followed by ten exclamation points. I have a 56K modem and waited 2 minutes for a picture to open! I did this several times and it never speeded up.

Since then I have tried FreeWorld a few more times, to give them the benefit of the doubt. Is it any faster? No.

And I still hold a grudge from the registration.




Recommended: No