Oh please oh please

I am writing this entry from my laptop.  Hopefully, it will post, and we will all be astonishingly impressed.

Let me clarify -- I am writing the entry from within AOL on my laptop.  (As opposed to from the web.)  It is this part that gives the whole thing the potential for astonishing impressability.

See... OK, to tell this story right, we have to go back.  Way way back.  Years.  Before this laptop.  Back when I had an iBook.  I liked my iBook an awful lot.  It connected to the internet via an AirPort (an Apple wireless router).  There was a downside to this.  I had a first generation AirPort and it didn't have an ethernet passthrough and ... look, I don't want to get all techno-geeky (and, yes, for me, this is techno-geeky) on you, but the bottom line was, I had a wired router AND a wireless router just to make the set-up work, and that created all sorts of fascinating problems.

And one of the more aggravating problems it caused was that, after a couple years, AOL just flat-out gave up working on the iBook.  I did not know why this was.  Nor did the AOL people.  But although I had a perfectly good internet connection going on the iBook, AOL would crash and burn every time I signed on -- most of the time, it wouldn't make it past the Welcome screen.

I never solved this problem.  I ultimately made it go away when, about a year later, I bought a new laptop altogether.  It is WIndows-based.  And because my whole system was Windows-based, I ditched the AirPort and got myself a new wireless router.  Et Voila -- AOL on the laptop.

Fast forward a couple years to a couple months ago.  AOL craps out on the current laptop.  I am not making this up.  Same freakin' problem.  After a few phone calls to Tech Support failed to solve it, their ultimate solution was for me to delete all AOL files from the laptop and re-install it clean from a disk.  I guess the theory was my copy of AOL was somehow badly corrupted. 

I said this was a couple months ago because the fine folks at AOL never sent me the disk.  Honest.  They said it would take six weeks, and I waited more than six weeks, and still no disk.  I finally got my hands on a copy when I waswhining about this at lunch, and a friend offered to give me the latest AOL disk that had come unsolicited in her mail.  (We'll set aside the snarky comment at the irony there -- because all will be forgiven if this works.)

So, I install the disk, I crank up AOL and ... it freezes.  Again.  I try again; it freezes again.  My conclusion:  AOL is not the problem.  Well, not directly.  My real conclusion is that there's something in AOL that does not get along with my router -- and whatever it is, AOL Tech Support sure can't figure it out.  My router is about 3 years old.  New, faster ones are available for, like, $30.  I buy me one of them, figuring that, worst case scenario, my internet connection on the laptop will speed up, even if it doesn't save AOL.

Which brings us to right now.  I installed the router, cranked up AOL and ... I'm still here!  I haven't had an AOL connection on this computer for more than 30 seconds in months and now it appears that I might have just solved this thing.

Fingers crossed.