sherwood

I have a friend who spends 6 months in France and six months in the UK.  For the last two years I have been able to help her set up an AOL account in France when she comes here using an Olitech external modem.  (Yes I know that she can use her UK account with a French dial up number but for some reason she doesn't do that).  This year I cannot get the computer to recognise the modem and establish a connection.  She has changed her computer and this one runs Win Xp as the OS while the other used Win98.  I seem to remember having problems myself with dial up and Win XP with an Olitech external USB modem (before I had ADSL) and that changing to a Serial or Parallel port Olitech solved the problem.  Unfortunately no one seems to be selling anything but ADSL modems now so I can't verify whether that is true in this case.  Can anyone in a similar situation throw light on this?    

That's always the give away - fortunately.  Otherwise more people would succumb to the spoof.

Well - I suppose you have to give them an 'A' for effort!

There are very few firms in the UK who will post to France.  One is www.laptopsdirect.co.uk.  I recently bought a Sony laptop from them.  You need to pay through an English bank account, cc etc which must be registered to your French address.  The first laptop ordered went missing in Paris but a replacement was sent and arrived in 3 days.  The charge for shipping to France is around £99 plus vat.

I live in France and can download from Paypal in Euros to my French bank account and in sterling to my English.  As long as you have the necessary accounts registered with Paypal there is no problem.  Can't get away from the poor exchange rate though!

I have been running a programme from Oxford University for the last four years with no problem at all. It is called 'Find-a-Drug' and is concerned with cancer research - among others.  The programme sits in the background and uses your unused computer capacity - it does not make your machine run slower or open you to any possible interference.  Computers all over the world are running this and the results have been very good.  Perhaps you would look at:  http://www.find-a-drug.org.uk/frame.html.  It is a very worthwhile cause and costs you nothing, in either time or inconvenience!   Joan