Re: A Bit Off Subject

Josh Hillman ( (no email) )
Wed, 30 Apr 1997 15:03:08 -0400

> Can anyone tell me what they use to distribute to their subscribers for
> access software? We currently use Usefulware and are having a real
problem
> with the Windows 95 package. I'm currently looking for a new source.

We normally don't issue anything for Windows 95 users. Windows 95 already
comes with everything necessary to get online (dialup networking, MS
Internet Explorer). From there, they can just download whatever software
(and updates) they want. There are a rare few that don't have MSIE because
they upgraded their computers to Win95 shortly after it was released--the
original upgrades didn't come with MSIE, but all upgrades as well as all
computers that come with Win95, now come with MSIE. In the case where they
don't have MSIE already, we often go out (or have them come in) and install
MSIE 3.02 Full-Install (from CDROM) onto the machine.
Upgrading to the newest version of MSIE is easy: have them download
msie302m95.exe and tell them to select "open" instead of "save as" and the
installation process is automatic. Unfortunately, the file's about 10 megs
and obviously takes a while to download.

Windows 3.1x:
Because Windows 3.1x doesn't come with anything, we supply MSIE 3.01
(Full-install) for Windows 3.1x. This occupies 4 3.5" HD disks and has
worked nearly flawlessly with every computer we've used it on. We dare not
touch the horrible, unreliable terminal-based Trumpet Winsock. We do have
a user or two that use a dialer that comes with Netscape, but it's
terminal/script-based and does not automatically initiate a PPP session.
We don't provide Netscape.

MSIE full-install for 95/NT includes the web-browser, Internet Mail, and
Internet News. 95 already has basic telnet and ftp clients, though better
ones are of course available off the net--some are free; some are
shareware.
MSIE full-install for Windows 3.1x includes MSIE, a TCP/IP stack, dialer,
Internet Mail, and I think it also comes with Internet News too.

It's pretty nice that MSIE is FREE, unlike many other applications out
there.

Josh Hillman
hillman@talstar.com