Let me tell you about aol back in 1995. They attempted to prevent their users from accessing the actual internet, by promoting businesses with sites on their personal servers that only aol users could access. They would only allow you to use the programs for accessing the internet that were provided with their package, including their inferior web browser. You could not connect to telnet, irc, usenet,or many of the other internet services using an aol connection. Forget about using netscape or the then inferior Internet Explorer. You could not access your old e-mail without being connected to the internet. They used to charge you by the minute for internet access meaning you could end up paying extremely high bills. Connecting to their servers was something that was near impossible in itself since the lines were always busy. A little while later the classic idle time limits were imposed so that you couldnt stay connected if you didnt use any of their services for five minutes. My brother and I had to take turns keeping the connection steady while downloading files. They had decent chat rooms on aol, but they were so congested, and limited to 30 users, that you could never get into the ones you liked. Then there were the skript kiddies hurting us using the now classic AOHell. After a month of this I moved to my first real ISP and found that the internet is actually 1000 times the size of aol. After 6 years aol realized that people want the whole internet, not just their little servers. They now offer the same things as all other ISP's but at a higher price for their "Special Content". If you are using aol, I feel for you, and I suggest that you look into a cheaper alternative.