Getting On-Line with a Mac

Not really, do they make aol/msn mac disks?

I feel for you man I had cable for a while when I was like 6 then we didnt have a computer for like 6 years then we had dial up untill like 3 monthes ago. Now we have cable.

 

AOL works with the disk, but the best thing is to get your ip number/ dns extra and put the numbers in and your done. There is a wizard thats really helpfull and very easy to use try it.

System Preferences>Network(up)>Assist me....

Insert the info then your done.

 

Or open up internet connect in your applications folder, fill out the relevant info and you're good to go!

 

Do you have an ISP (Internet Service Provider)? Dial-up or broadband? If it's dial-up, you should probably give them a call and see if they support Macs, some don't. If it's broadband, your DSL or cable modem probably has an ethernet port. Plug your iMac into the ethernet port, and it will just work. (You may have to reset the modem if it's cable because of DNS issues that crop up when switching connected device.)

 

I could be wrong but I believe you should be able to use a Mac with any dialup even if it doesn't support Mac. Don't you just need the phone number and login? You can't always get those "5x faster" programs but it should work. Someone correct me if I am wrong.

 

I will go one step farther. I don't want "support;" I just want the connection. For dial-up, most ISPs just work if you have an access phone number, account, and password. All you have to do is to launch the Internet Connect application, create a configuration, and off you go. For broadband, I recommend a router. However, MacOS X 10 or MacOS 9 works fine if you are connected directly to the broadband modem.

Back to why I don't want "support." My cable company offers "support" only to Windows users. Thank God, they use standard equipment so that MacOS X "just works" on the system. OTOH, Earthlink explicitly offers "support" for the Mac and its users. This means that they add crap that you really don't need. As I stated above, a dial-up access number, account, and password are all that you need to get on the 'net. Of course, you will also need the URLs of your ISP's servers that you use.

 

On dialup service, the computer what ever platform dials out to your ISP modems and makes the best connection possible. The ISP's modems doesn't know, nor care what OS is running. All it knows is that there is a computer trying to connect to me. Then it authenticates with the users username and password. Again, it doesn't know, nor care what OS is doing this. Many ISP's say they don't support Macs because of just that, there is no tech support reps for the Macintosh platform, nor do they care to have any. This DOES NOT mean that it won't work.

Even RoadRunner doesn't explicitly say that RR works with Mac OS X, but that DOES NOT mean that it doesn't work. In fact it works very well, but if you have problems with it, you may have trouble getting support.

Almost anything involving networks is platform independent. A router for example doesn't know, nor does it care what OS is sending/receiving packets.

So in other words a Mac will work with any ISP. Like someone else said, what probably won't work is the ISP's that have special software for this 5x internet which is most likely PC only.