On my wife's computer that I bought her from AOL years ago (which worked fine at the time, but in recent times froze up constantly because of all of its AOL software which I had re-routed to bypass), I finally simply re-booted a Windows XP program disk rewrite over everything in the computer. I had to give the PC permission to overwrite everything on the main partition, although at the time I left the backup partition intact...figuring I could backup up the new main partititon over it once I got the new quirks worked out of the main partition. Once I got loaded by rewriting over the main partition, I had to then load back on the utilities on the computer using the disk drive. I used a utility disk from the non-AOL Windows XP program, although some of the utilities wouldn't load because they recognized the computer hardware wasn't the correct brand. For those, I took the original AOL utilities disk and loaded it in the disk drive and separarately loaded only missing file utilities I felt were needed...like sound, etc. Since I had paid for the AOL utilities and AOL Office program when I originally bought the computer and its programs, I figured I still had rights to use them even if they were not used with all of the original bundled AOL products.

At that point, I tried re-connecting to the internet including re-installing via Window's wizard and my cable company's wireless disk. I had difficulty with that one and called the cable company's customer service, telling them I was paying for the connection, had their diskette, but that I intentionally crashed all programs on my computer to re-load and clean it up. They walked me through re-hooking up to the internet wireless over the phone. Note: It was a good thing I still had their installation disk.

Once that was in place and was reconnected to the internet, I downloaded McAfee from the cable company. Then, I took my original AOL program backup diskette, and from the disk drive on the computer re-loaded only the AOL Office program and files, even though the diskette warned me I had to reload the entire AOL backup program in its entirety. (That would have reinstalled all of the AOL bundled stuff again.) AOL Office had no problem reloading separately onto the computer. Then, I re-established Office's shortcut icons on Windows by dragging them from the start menu. Somewhere, I downloaded Adobe from the internet, too and made sure from one of the utility diskettes or Windows that Microsoft...Net.1 or whatever it is called was on the computer (it can also be downloaded free from Microsoft's site, if needed) to ensure add-on programs can be run. Then, I set all the security settings on Windows and McAfee that I needed to.

After testing everything, I went into Windows programs as well as Windows performance/maintenance administration and checked what was on there, free space, and the two partitions' organization. Finding I now had 92% free space on the old computer's main partition and everything loaded that was needed, I went ahead and backed up the newly arranged main partition on to the backup partition.

Voila...no more AOL, except AOL Office and a few hand chosen AOL utilities which were needed, the old desktop computer is now faster than the two laptops I have and matches the speed of the cable plugged in desktop that has twice the storage space than the old AOL computer, that my son bought three months, ago.

BTW, I figured if something went wrong when I started all this, I could simply re-load all the original bundled AOL stuff from the original backup set of diskettes, if needed. Or, buy another computer as the fact is, the AOL computer no longer worked without freezing. This all considers that we never used our AOL mail (or personalized screens) from long ago.

It's been two months now, and the old AOL based computer works like a charm now without all the bundled AOL, and should my wife once in awhile visit AOL, she just goes to it the same as she goes to Yahoo.

QM