Windows XP Evaluations

Windows XP Pro
NEWS & EVALUATIONS BY @MACARLO

Default Test Machine: Compaq Presario 5000 1GHz 512MB RAM 2x40GB HDD Quantum/Seagate

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Photo above shows AOL 8.0 starting on @Macarlo's Windows XP Professional

updateAOL 8.0 Really Improves
Net Surfing on Win XP Pro
"I prioritized this monster using Priority MasterIII 3.06 and now it is running just
fine and in extra-high speed, like Netscape 7.0!!"

Evaluation by Macarlo

The Maximum: 5 Butterflies

Hi, Folks...
AOL 8.0 is the most recent upgrade of America Online, updated with a wide array of new features and innovations that make using AOL and the Internet more valuable than ever before. I just evaluated this one on my Windows XP Professional (without Service Pack 1), running on a Compaq Presario Pentium III with 512MB RAM. I expended just 50 minutes downloading the upgrade from AOL US webcenter, using a cable connection on a link of 64KB. This new release installs without problems, quickly and easy, creating on your desktop a very small icon/tool called AOL Companion. This nice feature can be enlarged with a simple click of your mouse and then you've a complete set of options in order to get your e-mails, starting AOL Browser and more, much more...

This new AOL browser simply fly on the Net, with real high speed, and runs rather than Netscape 7.0 (latest release) that I've also downloaded and installed here. If you are seeking for effective efficiency and performance really enhanced I', recommending this new release of AOL to all Windows users, sincerely. I rated this one here with a maximum in @Macarlo, Inc. evaluations: 5 Butterflies.

Get ready to enjoy the best online experience ever with AOL 8.0!

With AOL 8.0 - it's easier than ever to -

Communicate and share
Get the information that you want - quickly
Help make your family safer and more secure online and
Personalize your AOL online experience with your interest and style!

Photo above shows AOL 8.0 Options for "My Welcome Screen"

NEW FEATURE HIGHLIGHTS OF AOL 8.0

Now you've got even better email! Everyone's favorite feature now makes it even easier to communicate, gives you more control, and lets you access messages from wherever you are.

It gives you more control of your messages:
-List your e-mails by people you know first, so you get right to the messages you want.

It's easier to communicate:
-Automatically keep track of e-mail addresses you use with the new address book. -Send a friend interesting online content, music, or just about anything - with a single click.

And it lets you access e-mail anywhere:
-Just log on to AOL.com from any computer on the Internet, and you've got mail! -Access e-mail features like your address book - they're saved online.

+Safe and secure--Parental Controls
Members have always trusted AOL's Parental Controls. Now they're even easier to set up and customize to help keep your kids safer online. -Let AOL guide you step-by-step through the setup process, and take advantage of more specific controls to suit the unique needs of your family. -You decide how much time your kids spend online with the new Online Timer. -Easily check and update settings from the icon right on the AOL 8.0 toolbar. -Learn how to stay smart about online safety with updates from AOL.

Photo above shows AOL 8.0 "My Welcome Screen" selected

Improved Search. AOL Search has made it even easier to get the information you need on AOL and the Internet - fast and easy -See the best results on the Web and AOL thanks to searches enhanced by Google. -Get relevant information - not just a list of links - to help you refine your search.
Get the information you want, when you want it. AOL 8.0 was designed for the way you use your online time. Whether you use AOL to manage your daily life, communicate and stay informed, or enjoy entertainment features, there's an AOL for you. -New Welcome Screens: Choose from a series of Welcome Screens give you direct access to what's important to you. -AOL Alerts: Be notified immediately about news events, weather, stock prices and sports scores. Plus, easily add events like TV times to your Alerts with a new "Add to Alerts" button found throughout the service. -Reminders: Share important information like the birth of a child or an event cancellation by having an alert sent immediately - even to cell phones.
AOL Call Alerts Until now, you didn't know if someone was trying to reach you while you were online. With AOL Call Alerts you can be online and never miss important calls. -If someone calls while you're online, you get an alert from AOL on the first ring. -You can even tell who's calling, just like caller ID. -You decide how to deal with the call - by taking a message, sending an immediate preset response to the caller, or ignoring the call. -Incoming phone messages are played for you online - there's no need to log off. -With AOL Call Alert, you don't have to schedule odd hours to go online or limit online time - go online whenever you want for as long as you want. And stay connected. See KW: Call Alert for details.

AOL Community - Be a part of it! There's something for everyone in the AOL Community: As an AOL member, you're part of a community of millions of people, with varied interests and ideas. New version 8.0 makes it even easier to share with members online: -Easily search AOL for members and groups whose interests reflect your own, whether it's golf, movies, music - anything! -Join a real-time chat discussion on a particular interest instantly with the new Match Chat feature - just type in your interest and AOL will take you right to a live discussion in progress. -Let the world know what you're all about with online polls and other interactive participation.

Photo above shows AOL 8.0 running just fine on Windows XP

AOL 8.0 Prioritized

On October 15th I was prioritized Netscape 7.0 on my Windows XP Professional and this nice browser was transformed in a rocket on the Net. Unfortunately Netscape 7.0, like 6.0, simply don't recognizes some HTML tags needed for play sounds from web pages loaded during Net surfing. Because this problem (I contacted the developers but this failure was not fixed) I decided to prioritize the AOL 8.0 in order to use it in my works on the Net. I did this prioritization and now...incredible but it's just the true!!...AOL 8.0 is flying on the Net as another rocket!! In the photo above you can see the prioritization window on my XP. I also evaluated AOL 8.0 using all available levels of prioritization by Priority MasterIII, including "High 13". I encourage you to read my review on Priority Master III clicking here.

Photo above shows AOL 8.0 running prioritized (High 13) by Priority MasterIII, V. 3.06, on @Macarlo's Windows XP Professional Web IDE.

Express yourself! We've added lots of features to help you add your own personal style to your online experience. -Bring your desktop to life with custom themes. -Choose wallpaper and sounds for your instant messages and even new custom themes for your smileys to show off your mood and personality! -Create colorful e-mail stationery to give that special message just the right touch.

Picture sharing, fun and easy. With AOL, if you can take pictures, you can view or share them online. And it's not just easier - it's more fun with 8.0. -Find your photos more easily, online or on your hard drive, with new Picture Finder. -Get creative with custom photo album layouts and captioning to add style to your collections. -Turn your albums into screensavers or slides shows and share them with your friends and family. -Have fun viewing and sharing pictures from your digital camera, too.
New services, content and programming -Daily features include more news and topical items to make it easy to hear and talk about breaking stories and key issues, entertainment and more. -AOL Music, will offer even more "firsts" and "exclusives" with Sessions@AOL and First Listen. -New AOL Shopping services offer the easiest way to browse, search and shop for products by department, category, store, brand and price as well as get product recommendations.

As with any software installation process, it is recommended that you exit all software applications, including shareware and freeware, during the installation of AOL.

AOL's Steve Case
Talks About 8.0

From time to time, I've written to tell you about things I think will interest you and to share my thoughts about important online issues.

Today, I am writing to tell you about the launch of our newest and, I think, our best version of AOL -- AOL 8.0. AOL 8.0 isn't just a new product. It's a return to AOL's focus on you, our members, and to our roots as an online community.

Over the years, a lot of you have told me that interacting with other people -- people you know and want to stay in touch with, people you'd likely want to get to know because of interests you share -- is the heart and soul of AOL.

We've heard that message loud and clear -- and we've acted on it.

The result is AOL 8.0 -- and we're excited to share it with you.

Thanks to you and the feedback you consistently provide, 8.0 includes many enhancements to your favorite features and a lot of new ones that we created with you in mind.

From Welcome Screens you can personalize to new Instant Message wallpaper, icons and sounds, AOL 8.0 lets you create an online experience that reflects who you are and what you like.

There's a new feature we call MatchChat that lets you search by keywords for chat discussions on any subject you choose -- making it easier than ever to find people with similar interests.

MusicShare lets you use Instant Messaging to share music and videos with the people on your Buddy List. And there are new "Share Buttons" that let you e-mail to friends and family anything you find on the AOL service.

8.0 also gives you more ways to voice your opinions and see what others think, with expanded news coverage, more instant polls and new ways to share your own content.

There's even a new online area that features your Hometown homepages -- and spotlights the best member-generated content on AOL 8.0's welcome screen.

In addition to enhancing AOL's community features, 8.0 also has cutting edge communications tools to make connecting with people easier than ever.

As you might expect, e-mail is AOL's most popular feature, and cutting down on "spam" -- junk e-mail - is something we all want to do. AOL 8.0 has new tools to help here, including a feature right on the mailbox that lets you choose to see only e-mail from people in your AOL address book. This lets you focus on mail from the people you know and want to hear from -- not the kind you delete without reading! To make this feature even more useful, 8.0 can automatically add to your address book the people you e-mail -- so it is quick and easy to create an ever-expanding "People I Know" list.

AOL 8.0 also improves connectivity, helping you to stay online. While we are always working to minimize disconnects, we know that some are inevitable, and they can be very frustrating. So we've built a feature into 8.0 that can automatically reconnect and return you to the same part of the service you were using when you disconnected.

We've always worked to create a service that makes your life easier -- and we've made real strides with 8.0. To give you just a couple of examples, the new Alerts & Reminders feature helps you juggle all the things you have to remember, like school events to attend or birthday presents to send. AOL 8.0 can also alert you -- via e-mail, instant message, or your cell phone -- when an important news story breaks, or a stock you own hits a certain price, or a football game you care about ends.

If you haven't used AOL Search lately, give it a try. Now powered by Google, it is a much more complete and useful search tool. And AOL's new shopping search feature quickly finds all the products -- and all the prices -- anywhere on AOL or the Web when you enter a product name or category. These new tools don't only make your life easier -- they can even help save money.

Finally, as we launch 8.0, we're also stepping up our commitment to kids' safety both online and off -- always a top priority for AOL. Whether its 8.0's enhanced parental controls that let you adjust your kids' online settings even while you're at work, or AOL's new online Amber Alerts, or "Safety Clicks," a new campaign we're launching this month with the National School Board Foundation that provides parents, teachers and kids themselves with safety resources, AOL is working to make everyone's online experience better than ever.

As you can probably tell, I'm excited about 8.0 and all the new features that really make AOL better than ever. But what I like the most about AOL 8.0 is the way all these features work together. That AOL "feel" has always been more important than any single feature -- it's what's helped make AOL the greatest online community in the world. I think you'll agree that 8.0 stays true to those roots, preserving AOL's unique and comfortable feel and building on its wonderful community sense.

We've listened to what you said you wanted -- and also to what you didn't want. One of the most common AOL complaints lately has been about the "pop up" advertisements that appear when you sign on to the service. Many of you have told us that when you're eager to get online to check your mail or news, you're annoyed to see an ad, especially when it's often for a product you aren't interested in. So we've decided to stop accepting pop up ads. We'll honor existing commitments -- so you'll continue to see some pop-ups over the coming weeks. And we'll still use them from time to time to notify you of new AOL features and special member benefits, or to inform you about special promotions from AOL Time Warner. But we will no longer accept ads from companies that want to use pop-ups. That means when you sign on to AOL, you'll see a lot less of what you don't want -- and a lot more of what you do want. We're making this change -- and so many others -- to make your online experience better than ever. An d the best is yet to come.

So I hope you'll download AOL 8.0 -- it's free! -- and see for yourselves why I believe it is the best version of AOL so far.

Staying connected. Keeping informed. Sharing the things that are important to us. That's what it means to be part of a community -- and that's what AOL 8.0 is all about. So I hope you'll enjoy AOL 8.0 -- we made it for you!

Warm Regards,

Steve Case

@Macarlo, Inc.
@Macarlo's Shareware & Web
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