5 Reasons AOL Should Have Quit a Long Time Ago

AOL, more commonly referred to as AO Hell, is one of the single worst service providers ever. AOL has been accused, and with good merit, more times then once, of collecting more then just passwords and billing information. This realization of just how bad AOL is came to me when I was doing some maintenance on my aunts computer.

Reasons AOL Should Have Quit a Long Time Ago #1, Lost Drive Space.

This is one of the biggest problems I've noticed with AOL. It seems to grow all the time, and consume massive amounts of drive space. But I had not realized just how bad it really could get until recently. While attempting to find the reason my aunts computer refused to run a complete defrag, I found the answer to be right under my nose. AOL had been expanding on it's anti spyware dat files for some time, till they had consumed 40 gigs of hard drive space. God only knows what was really being stored there.

Reasons AOL Should Have Quit a Long Time Ago #2, Poor Customer Service.

AOL really likes to get you to sign up for free trials, but doesn't like it so much if you call them up to have your service canceled. I've literally gotten into arguments with customer service representatives of AOL, because they wanted to give me months, even years of free service just to keep me with them. Now ordinarily this would be great, but when they refuse to answer just what AOL is really doing with all that background processor time, and the massive amounts of RAM it uses. This throws up red flags for any good computer tech.

Reasons AOL Should Have Quit a Long Time Ago #3, Too Expensive.

AOL has always been one of the more expensive ISPs on the market, but more recently it's come to my attention that they still charge some where in the range of $20 a month for 56K service, when a person could easily get broadband for $10 more. This seems horribly uncompetitive.

Reasons AOL Should Have Quit a Long Time Ago #4, Lousy Browser.

Some people for, god only knows what reason, actually like the AOL browser, but for most it's more of a nuisance then anything. The way it requires you to log in every time you want on line, the way it forces you to look at it's pop ups before you can begin browsing the Internet, and the way it consumes every bit of memory, both physical, and random it can get it's hands on.

Reasons AOL Should Have Quit a Long Time Ago #5, No Longer an ISP.

AOL is no longer an ISP, though Time Warner bought AOL and provides cable Internet, they do so without forcing you to get AOLs crappy service. Which makes you wonder, why the name AOL even gets mentioned in passing conversations anymore. AOL does great as a provider of free email, and a Google results search engine, perhaps even as a home page for your other browser, but it's clearly a failure when it comes to being an ISP.

Reasons AOL Should Have Quit a Long Time Ago, Personal experience.

I once installed AOL and noticed it using up to %50 of my processor time in the background, while I did nothing more then browse the web. Then over the course of countless computer service calls, I've found AOL to be the culprit of many problems, such as missing hard drive space, corrupted volumes and more. Whatever benefits you may think you are getting from using AOLs browser, the drawbacks most definitely outweigh the benefits. So do what I did, kick AOL to the curb and use Fire Fox, Google Chrome, or even IE as your default Internet browser.