Having a high speed link to the Internet at work made using my neat little eOne computer at home for surfing more and more tiring with its dial-up connection, especially with time limited by the attention needs of two little girls clamoring to play. The eOne from eMachines is the iMac lookalike with a PC soul that is great because it is an integrated unit (15" monitor with a 466 MHz Celeron) which makes up for its lack of normal expansion slots by including two Type II PC Card inputs, three USB ports, high resolution video capture, modem and Ethernet all built in. And all for only $799 from Circuit City last year. I got a three year warranty for $89 considering the unique nature of the machine. But a lawsuit from Apple has crimped the distribution of faster models and it is no longer listed at the http://www.e4me.com web site.

This machine is cute and beckons you to use it. Josie, my three year old, already can change CD’s and start up the games she wants, thanks to its kid friendly feel with the CD player directly under the monitor. It was kind of weird when I first heard the music of a game I had not loaded for her coming from the living room where we keep the computer.

All this was fine, but the Internet at home beckoned. The ads for DSL were tempting. We were using two phone lines since, when we did get on the computer to check email and such and wait for the slow downloads, it made sense to have the extra phone line. Dropping that line and using that cost savings as more justification for a DSL line made sense. The result, with the local DSL competition here in the Washington, D.C. area, was only a bit over $20 a month more for a line ten times faster than a 56K modem! And this was SDSL, not ADSL. Which means up and down links are the same speed. By the way, a great site to check your Internet speed is at http://www.computingcentral.com/topics/bandwidth/speedtest.asp.

Given the always on nature of DSL, and I did keep the computer always on, I installed the free ZoneAlarm software from http://www.zonelabs.com/ and checked my security and web presence using the www.grc.com site. I was well hidden.

Now I paid attention to all those neat things I was reading about new web sites – and began to check them out. The payoff came soon: Such a site is http://www.dialpad.com which offers free PC-to-phone calls anywhere in the U.S. I do not know what business model can pay for a company offering this service using just a few banner ads and a shop for PC phone accessories, but more power to them because the site works almost perfectly! Setup is easy, and the information I filled out several months ago has resulted in no unsolicited email or snail mail. My favorite use for the site was when I was on vacation to visit the Expo 2000 World’s Fair in Hanover, Germany. I kept in touch with the States using dialpad.com on friends’ systems using only modems! The biggest thing to be aware of is that the ringing you hear simulates the real ringing of the party you are calling. There is about 3 seconds of delay from the time they actually answer until you hear the ringing stop and you can hear them. But they can hear you, so now I hum or mumble something nonsensical when calling someone who does not know I am using it until I hear them so they do not hang up. My mom now knows and is very patient with the initial silence!

For the last couple of months, our phone bills have been at least $20 less due to the use of dialpad.com for long distance, so now the DSL is "free"—and that was with a long distance service that gave five cents a minute all the time with no fee!

But with over ten million users, dialpad.com is sometimes down and sometimes choppy. Try again right away for the times it is busy and wait awhile if you can for the less clear times. I found that my computer was introducing most of the noise at first -- it took a lot of testing using Windows’ sound recorder. But now I have had calls where the other party does not even know I am using it! The best comparison is a digital cell phone. If you can live with those, you’ll have no problem with dialpad.com! u