Computer Rant

Would you believe it, I've just now spent almost entirely in sheer waste these last hours and halves at this word processor program – having sat down aiming to write a rant about some of the latest frustrations I encounter (have encountered) with the PC and all that – and have ended up with an item for the list, considering that the time was spent at relearning (or maybe not yet learnt) how to format styles and save them to template, &c. [And now I see quite unwelcome corroborating evidence that I still have immense shortcomings in using this whole Style function.]

But so it goes.

AOL

I do have a question for my immense clientele – reading public. Let's see here. I've got a subscription to AOL for my dial-up service. Reasons: It's free. (As long as I milk their system, quit them and re-sign with them afterwards. Thanks be to extravagant marketing budgets.) And, though I never know whether and how much do I have money, what's undeniable is that I have a penurious fist which pinches pennies. So free matters. Thinking on this here, I see there's no other reason for having AOL.

There are however reasons for dissatsifaction. Whether it be dissatsifaction with dial-up as such, or with my PC, or with my apartment's (let's say) infrastructure – its phone connection, e.g. -- or something else, I don't know, and thus is my question. First, though, the problem, or: the symptoms: I get disconnected every ten to twenty minutes (exaggeration but not entirely too much so). Maybe other symptoms as well, and maybe I haven't quite got that one out properly here, but if so, I leave their discussion to another day.

Except: On speed, I see I'm connecting at about 33 (kbaud?), typically. I figure I ought to be able to connect faster than that, but maybe that's just the way things work with dial-up, you're lucky or you aren't, about the access numbers and their traffic local to you. If not, though, I wonder what I can do about it.

Specifically on that and on this whole discussion, would another dial-up possibly keep me from these problems (of speed and of disconnection-rates)? And (for what it's worth) the ISP service I have in mind is (at) http://telex.org.

Batteries

Someone (translation: Better help myself) please help figure this. My batteries – both the spare and the other – for my laptop, they don't recharge. Is this a setting somewhere? (A radio-style button reading, “Do not recharge”?) Are both my batteries disfunctional? Is their port disfunctional? I can tell this, should say this, the computer is able to read the level (i.e., 0%) of power correctly.