Price $19.99  Un-registered version (reviewed above) $9.99

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InKline Stay Connected 3.2

By Bill Hughes, LACS

There wasn't much in the way of documentation, just a single-sheet advertising blurb and a CD/ROM.  My assumption was that there would be documentation on the CD/ROM.  That turned out to be invalid.  Still, I figured it might be worthwhile to try to blunder ahead and install the program.  The only instruction that came with it said, very simply and to the point,  "Insert media into drive and double click on SETUP.EXE in the root directory".  I suppose that I shouldn't actually aver that there was NO documentation.  No, there was a readme.txt file on the "media", and I had rather hoped it would contain some documentation; but this was not the case.  It just repeated the instruction, which I quoted above.

I put the "media" into the drive and clicked on setup.exe in its root directory (do they still use the expression,  "directory"?). The installation hopped right into gear, and the program was installed in a minute or so. Very painless. Now that it was installed, there didn't seem to be much to do.  No options.  No "fire it up."  No turn it off.  It was just "on", and that was that.  Next question:  Does it work?

In order to find out if it works I needed to be on-line and be vulnerable to getting kicked off for inactivity, or whatever.  I went on-line and logged onto LAFN (Los Angeles Freenet), my favorite ISP in this area.  LAFN gives you unlimited hours on the internet, but only one hour at a time and it dumps you after about ten minutes of inactivity.  On weekends and after midnight any day, you get increments of two hours.  Would Stay Connected keep me from getting disconnected?  I went out to the kitchen to get a peanut-butter jelly sandwich.  When I got back, I was disconnected.  Grrrr!  Had I done something wrong?  Or is the program a failure?  I was inclined toward the latter supposition. So I finished the peanut-butter jelly sandwich, brushed my teeth, and hit the sack disappointed.

Next time I fired up the computer I got a reminder that Stay Connected v. 3.0 was standing watch to keep me on the air.  Yeah!  Sure!  Well, I could uninstall it later and write a scathing review.  I needed to download my correspondence, of which there was no paucity.  While the download was going on I noticed a couple interesting looking messages in the stack (from a good-looking blonde), so I started reading whilst the download proceeded.  This diverted my attention, and the next thing I knew, my two hours were up and I was disconnected.  Hey!  I should have been dumped a long time ago.  What happened?  Does Stay Connected actually work as advertised?  Wow!  Maybe I just needed to restart the computer.  Well, it's not the first dumb thing I've ever done.

Since then, I have had ample evidence that Stay Connected v. 3.0 indeed does keep you connected - at least you don't get dumped for inactivity.  Not on my ISP, at least.  Great!  One wouldn't expect the program to keep you connected past the one-hour limit (two on weekends).  After all, that is a parameter set by the ISP.  LAFN (Los Angeles Free Net) is a wonderful deal, but as a non-profit, its funds are definitely limited, and it cannot afford to have you hogging the band without use.  Nevertheless, it is great when they don't kick you off just because you are answering an email that just came in that demands an immediate answer.  That has been a definite annoyance, and I am glad to have the decision left up to my own conscience.

So the program works.  It is easy to install.  I wish it had a little documentation, but perhaps none is needed. Initial examination of the CD/ROM indicated it had some other programs on it. They are called,  "OLIGO,"  "Modem Booster",  "My Favorites",  "Red Box Organizer",  "Visual Day Planner", and "Visual Calendar Planner."  Again, there is no documentation even to tell you what these programs are supposed to do.  I started to install them, but was rebuffed by a box that said that they would expire in 21 days unless you bought them, so I immediately uninstalled them and do hope that they have not screwed up my operating system too much.  As it stands, I get some strange dialog boxes when I start up my computer (missing files and such), but the computer still seems to be running.

The first one of these, OLIGO, seems to be some sort of a browser, and I'd love to give it a try, but not without documentation, and that goes for the others too!  I'm sure not going to buy them without having some notion of what they are about.  My guess is that the InKline people probably meant to provide documentation on the CD/ROM but got into too much of a hurry when they shipped the CD/ROM, or "media" as they call it, out to the User Groups.