How to get back on the internet

About a month ago I was shut out of the internet on my computer because of something going wrong with my dial-up networking. At least that's what AOL claimed after everything they tried failed. What is dial-up networking, and why do I have to reinstall it? And do I really need to call Dell? That's what I was thinking after getting done with AOL.

Dell was useless as my warranty expred long ago.

So I managed to find a Microsoft support page with a very complicated set of instructions with long lists of commands and file names I had to do stuff to in order to get my connection working. After viewing it once or twice over a couple of weeks, I decided that today was the day that I would give it a shot and hope to get my computer working!

After learning to create a .bat file and running that, I had to figure out how to extract the files I needed from the Windows 98 CD-ROM. In the process of doing that I realized that their procedure was stupid and that I could just drag and drop the necessary files into their proper folders. Then I found out I did too much with that .bat file, because Microsoft's labeling of "Windows 98" and "Windows 98 Second Edition" was not consistent on the support page, so I did stuff for 98 only that I shouldn't have done. Thankfully corrected that mess of renamed files.

Then, after I completed the reinstall, I discovered again that any AOL beyond 5.0 doesn't work on my computer. So here I am, online on my computer, running AOL 5.0, and I couldn't be happier.