A couple of days later, I gave Ralph a call to see what the situation was and set up an appointment. I arrived at Ralph's house on the 21st of April, headed into his office and this is what I found...
It was an HP Pavilion 6746C. The full specs can be found on HP's website. Don't get me wrong; I have nothing against that computer. Heck, my first PC I actually bought was an HP Pavilion 6835. But that was over eleven years ago!! I have upgraded many times since then and had recently purchased a newer HP Slimline model. One big difference between myself and the man I was helping out is; he is in his eighties and never really used or had a need for a PC (his wife always used it) and I started out with PCs as a hobby, used them for college, and now, obviously, for my computer business and everything else. The main reason why he wants to use the computer now is so he can email his daughter back and forth who lives out of state. That's it but I think that's great.
Now, on to the problem at hand and conclusion. I had Ralph show me what was going on with his dial-up. Basically, the Walmart dial-up software (yes, Walmart had an internet service!) he was using was corrupted and needed to be reinstalled; something about the registry settings in the program or something to that affect. I asked Ralph if he had the Walmart disc (or disk) laying around so I can reinstall the program. He gave me a CD-R with "Netscape" written on it. I had a puzzled look on my face as to why he gave me this disc of which he said he used to try to reinstall too but to no avail. After trying to install the program using this disc, multiple times, I realized it was a Netscape.ca disc..... a Canadian version! Trying to explain this to him after showing him it was asking for a "province" to choose for access number retrieval was a BIG chore. So, I said I'll see if I can find the Walmart disc and get it all taken care of.
After doing some research online about this situation in my SOHO (Small Office/Home Office), I found out Walmart merged with Netscape's internet service and there was no way to reinstall the older Walmart program. The download links were redirecting to Walmart's main site so I downloaded the Netscape ISP software and installed it.
After trying to log onto the Netscape service using the Walmart log in information, it denied it, saying it needed to be an "@netscape.com" username. I then decided to give the Netscape company a call and tell them the situation. The guy pretty much said I could not redownload the older Walmart program and would have to create a new Netscape account for the customer. The billing information would still be the same. I said, thank you, and hung up the phone.
There I sat, at around 2AM or so in the morning wondering what the best route was to go about this screwed up situation. Here is a man who just wants to use cheap dial-up, which was working fine all these years until recently, to talk to his daughter who lives out of state. But, of course, the service merged with another service (happens too much in the computer industry: Compuserve-AOL, Skype-Microsoft, need I say more?) and that requires a new email address. So, I thought about just doing away with this Netscape crap all together and decided to go for Netzero, considering we had to change the email address and this ISP is newer and more popular than Netscape, which is, surprisingly, still around.
I went to the Netzero site to download the software to install on the PC I was setting up for the customer. After many attempts at trying to find a link to DOWNLOAD the software to set it up, I ended up chatting with customer service online. The transscript is as follows with no edits:
| You are now connected with : Diana | |
Diana: | My name is Diana, how may I help you? |
Diana: | Hi Justin, how may I help you? |
You: | Hi, Diana. |
You: | I have a situation.... |
You: | I am trying to help out an old customer of mine who has been using walmart connect (now netscape connect) for a long while until it stopped working on his 12 year old Me PC. |
You: | I'd like to try to get him away from that crap ISP and set him up with a netzero dialup account but, of course, there are no more netzero cd's around for obvious reasons. |
You: | I went to the site to see if I can download it to install on his PC without having to sign up for an account first. |
You: | I need to have some game plan by 10:30a tomorrow. It's now close to 5am where I am. |
Diana: | Hi Justin, please be informed that in order to download the NetZero CD Rom first you need to sign up for an account. |
Diana: | Please visit our Web site at http://www.netzero.net/support/start/cd.html for information about ordering a NetZero CD, installing and creating an account. |
You: | I understand but that is quite a challenge when the customer's house has no internet access at all and uses dial-up of which I am trying to fix. |
Diana: | Hi Justin you may also call us at our sales number at 1-800-638-9876 and a Customer Service representative will be happy to assist you. Representatives are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. |
You: | Thank you very much for your time. |
Diana: | It has been my pleasure serving you today. |
Diana: | Do you have any other concerns or questions that I can assist you with? |
You: | Other than wishing dial-up access in the US would not exist anymore, no, but thank you. No offense to Netzero though, of course. I started out with Juno a long time ago. |
So, there you have it. As you can see above, the ONLY way to download the Netzero software is to sign up for an account FIRST or possibly have them send a disc by calling the customer service number, which will take a week or so to get. Is it me or do you also find not being able to download the software to set up on a PC in a location with NO internet access kind of RETARDED?! Here it is, 5AM and I've been up since 8AM or so the previous morning with no solution so I had a thought...
I went to Att.com to see if they had any specials because I know the DSL lite is $19.95 a month or something close to there. I went to the site and, sure enough, they had this deal where if you sign up for the faster service (Xtreme or whatever it's called now), you get the modem for free instead having to pay $75 for the damn thing. I printed out the pages with this information and, finally, headed to bed and worked on a game plan to try to convince this man, who just wants dial up and nothing fancy, to sign up and use DSL.
I gave him a call and went back to his house the following day (or the day after that), told him about the situation, told him about AT&T's current offer and he agreed to it. I called up AT&T for him and got him all set up with the service. The DSL kit came later that week. He gave me a call, I showed up again, hooked it all up and he was good to go. I had to train him a bit on the new "simpler" set-up and, after a few tries, he managed to do it on his own.
So, the moral of this story and adventure is... never try to fix anyone's dial up issues anymore. It's not worth my trouble and their disgust when I tell them why it can't be fixed. For about $20 a month, which is only $10 more than dial up, why hang on to dial up? I know there are some reasons where one has no choice but if it is your area and you can get it, go for it!!! You'll thank me later!
And like I said in the title, why doesn't dial-up just GO AWAY already... in the US?!! To me, it isn't worth the trouble anymore... especially when NEW PCs DO NOT come with a DIAL UP MODEM!! Another customer I helped out had to spend an additional $60 with her new PC to get a USB dial-up modem. After a few months of trouble with that and her Gmail account.... I had her switch to DSL too. So, there you go, AT&T, I added those two, plus another two (one being Burt who I mentioned above and a friend of mine who lives in the same community) to your service. Where is my reward? ;-) I should contact them about being an affiliate.
Until next time....
Dragon
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