<font color=skyblue>A guy that manages PCs for the church buildings in the area gave me one because I had mentioned once that if he ever came into possession of an extra one to give me a chance at it. Well, Dell gave our church buildings all new PCs and all the old ones got handed out to members for whatever use they could make of them. I got one for my mom so that she could do little things like write printable letters, or even make use of e-mail with the family.

It appears to be a Pentium II, 400MHz, 10Gig HDD, Win98. That is sufficient for a first-timer on a PC who don't even know how to turn the power on, right?

So, my question is...what is the best way to get free net access through her dial-up? Does anyone know of one that is better than another? A long time ago, did not NetZero have a free option? Do they still do that? </font>

Nice, I managed to pick up a Dell P3 for nothing too out of an office, they are handy! I have no idea about net in America, but that thing should be sufficient to do small tasks, although it will crawl a bit and make that annoying noise that all old PCs do.

Is Pay Per Minute net access a lot cheaper than Pay Per Month over there?

I've never heard of any pay-per-minute service...but pay per month can be as cheap as $6 a month, if you're willing to accept limits on the amount of usage...or that's what basicisp.net was offering when I was trying to find some cheap dial-up over the summer.

Seems like there are some sites that sort isp's by price and availability in your area...though I'm not real sure how reliable those sites are.

NetZero used to be free, but then they got to big for themselves. I used to use it, however, for 9.95, you can get the basic NetZero plan, or, according to the commercials on tv, you can get Netscape with accelerator for the same price, NetZero charges 14.95 for that. Starting to sound like the commercial.

I used Juno for a long time. It was free, and worked for me. They merged with someone... might have been NetZero. You might check that.

I believe NetZero still has a free plan, although it limits the user to 10 hours per mounth.

http://account.netzero.net/s/landing...ree&group=free

<font color=skyblue>It'll have to be free because my mom cannot afford even the cheapest fee because she is living off a small state check. I do not know if my wife would agree to me taking on another bill. Hopefully this NetZero, 10 hours per month deal will work. She is too old to "surf" the web, but just to check her free e-mail account and see family updates on myfamily.com where we all post pictures, video and news would probably stay under ten hours per month.

Thanks, guys and gals.</font>