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Time Tracker
Dialer2000 provides an excellent and accurate time tracker, provided you use the utility for dialling all your connections. You’ll see in Figure 1 how the utility records the time spent online for the current session, for the day, a month and a year. The statistics can be used to manage your online time efficiently.
List Email Headers
Another useful feature of Dialer2000 is its List Email Headers. This feature enables you to have a look at the list of emails you have in your mailbox without downloading them. The advantages are obvious. You can delete the mails you don’t want and even sneak peak at the content of some before they are downloaded.
Some of the leading ISPs here have similar features in their Web email services. For example, the Global Mail Service of one of them enable subscribers to view their email headers, access, compose and send their mails from anywhere in the world. With the Global Mail Service you need not take your Notebook PC with you when traveling. Just hop into a Cyber Café in any city and access your mail, reply to them and send new mails all for peanuts. In London and Paris you’ll be charged about a quid per hour and the connections are fast. Figure 3 is an example of the Dailer2000 email headers.
Figure 4:
Dailer2000 Email Headers
The Launch Bar
Dailer2000 can be used to launch your favourite applications. It has room for 22 applications launchers as shown in figure 1.This feature provides great convenience and helps clear up the clutter of shortcut icons from your desktop.
Hints and Tips for a Stress-free Connection
Even though a utility like Dailer2000 can help you, getting online without much stress is largely a matter of common sense. The first stage is to connect to your local ISP’s server. To do so smoothly needs some timing. Most of our ISPs are located in Lagos because the bulk of their clients are there. These clients are mostly corporate organizations at present. The official working time for these busy organizations is 8am to 5pm. As a home or small business PC user, you stand a better chance of getting a speedy connection outside those hours. I do most of my online work between 6am and 9am and between 9pm and 11pm and, believe me, it seems as if I have the whole of my ISP’s network to myself at those times. No traffic, one dial and ‘am online, even without the help of Dialer2000!!
The second stage is to lunch your browser and enter the URL of the site you want to visit on the Net after getting a connection. Without a good timing you may encounter traffic jams that will slow you down or even prevent you from reaching your destination. Bear in mind that Internet usage is most intense in the USA. 174 million Americans have access to the Net and they spend an average of 22 hours per month there buying goods and services, researching, sending email or just surfing for pleasure. It follows that there will be less congestion online when our American friends go to bed. There is roughly six hours time difference between us. You are therefore likely to get a free flow of traffic between 6am and 11am from here. And since most businesses do not open shop on weekends, that is another period for free flow of Internet traffic.
A good hint we have all heard repeated often is to do all we can offline before going online. This applies mainly to email. Compose all your mails offline and store them in the Outbox before going online to send them. For Web surfing, you can install an offline Web page reader to help you minimise your online time. There are many free offline Web page browsers to choose from. My favourite one is Secret Agent, available at: www.ariel.co.uk/sagent/. Secret Agent will capture all the Websites visited in its cache and make them available to you offline. Website Extractor is another offline browser you can try. The program can download entire sites and save them on your hard drive with their directory structure intact for viewing offline. Get it from: www.esalesbiz.com/extra.
Dailer2000 will not only get you online easily when others are struggling to do so, it will also help to give you a competitive edge in both business and home use without taking a big bite out of your wallet. It costs only $15.
Sanya Oloruntoba
