changing from aol to ntl help needed

photome

I have been with aol for about 5 years and have always used their email addresses and their browser.

I have a few questions that i hope someone can help me with

1. I have a huge list of favourites on aol. does anyone know if i can transfer these across to my new ntl account or onto internet explorer or anywhere else for that matter.

2. should i now use an alternative email address other than my isp as i am now having to let everyone know that i am losing my aol addresses. if so any suggestions.

3. is it worth using an alternative browser anyway

Wombat

I can't answer your 2 specific questions, but a word of caution here. When I transferred someone from AOL to NTL, the NTL software would not work at all. We contacted NTL who were baffled, and the only way that I could get NTL to work on the PC was to format the hard drive and start again from scratch because of something unlocatable left by the AOL software after it was supposedly uninstalled that was preventing their rival's software from working.

This may not be the case for the latest NTL software, but I thought you ought to be aware of the problem in case you get the same.

Good luck.

photome

Wombat wrote:

I can't answer your 2 specific questions, but a word of caution here. When I transferred someone from AOL to NTL, the NTL software would not work at all. We contacted NTL who were baffled, and the only way that I could get NTL to work on the PC was to format the hard drive and start again from scratch because of something unlocatable left by the AOL software after it was supposedly uninstalled that was preventing their rival's software from working.

This may not be the case for the latest NTL software, but I thought you ought to be aware of the problem in case you get the same.

Good luck.

Thanks for that. I do have reservations as I have heard that sort of thing before. The bottom line is that I am paying AOL 24.99 a month for 1mb broadband ( I only have a ntl cable line so am limited to the amount of isp i can use). NTL want 9.99 a month for 12 months a saving of £180 over the year so I thought I would give it a try

Wombat

Yes, makes good financial sense. Also, a bit of negotiation on your part may pay dividends. My partner swapped her ISP to NTL Broadband and was offered free phone calls for a year on her NTL phone line.

Good news on the Favourites front!! AOL favourites will only work with AOL and are saved in a special format. But it can be done:

Q: We are switching from America Online to EarthLink. We have three years of Favorite Places bookmarked in AOL, and we need to know how to transfer them to Internet Explorer, which we will be using as our browser. There doesn't seem to be a way to do that. Any suggestions?

A: America Online doesn't have an option for saving Favorite Places (also known as bookmarks) in formats compatible with other browsers. You can save a list of Favorite Places as a backup file, but it can only be used with AOL's software. As is often the case, however, the after-market has sprung into action, giving us a number of ways to convert AOL Favorite Places so you can use them in Internet Explorer (or Netscape or Firefox, for that matter).

One option is a free service such as LinkaGoGo (linkagogo.com) and MyBookmarks (mybookmarks.com). These are Web sites that let you store your bookmarks online -- and convert them from one format to another. If an online solution makes you nervous, consider ePreserver, a $24.95 program you can get at connectedsw.com, or URL Organizer ($9.95 from urlorg. com/urlorganizer2). Although it's too late, you could have avoided the bookmark problem simply by using Internet Explorer in the first place. Once you're connected to AOL, you aren't locked into using its browser. You can use any browser you like.

If you wanted to use an alternative email address anyway, it would be a good idea to change now as you will have to notify everyone only the once.

Mozilla Firefox is a good alternative to Internet Explorer and, again, now would be a good time to set it up so that you won't have to transfer stuff from IE later (although Firefox does have a transfer utility).

Hope this helps.