Another Reason to Despise AOL

I have despised AOL for about a decade. At that time I was having trouble with my ISP and decided to give AOL another try after abandoning it as the then-overpriced Internet portal and email provider that it was. I installed it from one of those “Try AOL Free” CDs that used to litter my mailbox and after 5 minutes of use I remembered why I hated it so much and uninstalled AOL. But, AOL had taken over my computer and left many AOL components installed across obscure directories, causing multiple errors. At that time I worked in a computing field that gave me enough background knowledge to be able to locate and blow away these nuisance files. I pity the average user who would have had to pay a computer tech to get their system back to normal back then.

AOL continued to haunt me as my friends with AOL accounts forwarded emails to me, which would arrive as an attachment. I would click on the attachment only to have another attachment open, click again and another would open. What a joke! I gave all AOL email the Three Click Rule – if I could not get to the forwarded content in three clicks, I hit the delete key. My patience and available time has worn thin in recent months and now AOL email gets the One Click Rule.

So, now About Antivirus Software gives another reason to hate AOL, although it doesn’t effect me personally:

These ad network providers use cookies, web beacons, or similar technologies on your computer to help present, better target, and measure the effectiveness of their advertisements, using data gathered over time and across their networks of Web pages to determine or predict the characteristics and preferences of their audience. Read the whole enchilada – Crucial for AOL Users!