Experiencing the People PC Dial-up Product

When my wife and I first moved to Portland, and needed net access, we usually stopped down at the library in St. Johns. That was a fun outing, but could turn into a hassle if there are a lot of people were waiting to get online. They also strictly limit you to an hour (with an application that closes your browser session and logs you off, regardless of what you are doing), so we had been hoping to get some kind of service at the house for awhile.

Knowing we were going to be where we were staying at her dad's for only a short time, and being somewhat broke, one day at Fred Meyer, we picked up a PeoplePC CD with a kind of garish blue and white cover, featuring a running stick man, and decided to give it a try. Under my windows-software-installation-suspicious eyes, installation went smoothly, and the service worked okay, albeit kind of slowly. But it was cheap, and free from any long term commitment. $5.47 per month, for the first 3 months, and 10.96 thereafter.

Not that we weren't grateful, but one of the main problems I found right away with the service is their BartShel.exe module, which manages the dial-up connection, acceleration setting, and what have you. It is resource intensive (slow), and doesn't always cooperate with other installed software. Parts of the service application design are not robust, difficult to understand, and impossible to control. You are forced to keep a IE window open which can't be minimized or closed, which is pointed at their homepage, and which generates script errors in Internet Explorer. They have a search window, at the top which launches a new iteration of Internet Explorer at the target url. To this I'll add, I don't really dislike it as much as some other packages I've seen, but I also don't want more unnecessary software on my pc, simply the dial-up connection.

Their customer interaction methods rely heavily on Javascript, which (in my case) spits a lot of error messages, and that, on probably one of the most common browser/os platforms on the planet (ie/xp). I'd recommend they rethink that approach. The customer is always in a better position if they have the ability to make their own choices. PeoplePC is not, an online service. They are a dial-up internet access provider. They should, at minimum, provid dial-up internet access. Services or features beyond that shouldn't take away from their core offering, but should be optional, easy to add or remove.

It's all academic at this point, since I just bypassed BartShel and uninstalled it, which you can read about in my next post. The advise I'd offer PeoplePC (for which they won't probably ask) is that it is would be better for them not to try to manage every aspect of a person's account and online experience especially not with code that can't work across a variety of browsers.

We'll see if my adjustments can turn PeoplePC dial-up into the product I actually want, instead of the one they want to offer me. The price is still right, and on a good day, the network approaches speeds that can be considered usable.

Also, we recently ordered the new peoplepc DSL product, for which we haven't heard or seen many other reviews. We'll see how that goes.

I'll keep you posted on the status of DSL from them, which is now available through Earthlink, although their homepage still officially states they don't offer such services as DSL. You get a graphic link simply stating PeoplePC DSL in your proprietary uncloseable ie connection manager window, so I imagine you'd have to already be a customer in order to see it.

Thanks,

-Warren