Gripes about NetZero

NetZero is a free Internet access providers (ISPs). Like their competitors, NetZero requires you to download and use their software to dial your modem and get on the Internet (see below). The price for free Internet access is having to view ads while online. I think that NetZero is the largest free ISP.

You are required to use the NetZero dialer program to log on to the Internet (see below for sample screen shots) and to always view an ad windows while online. At least two other free ISPs do not require you to view ads while online and at least one other, that I know of, lets you dial onto the net with the plain Windows OS dialer program.

I installed v2.0.1 on an NT machine and it worked. Then I logged on later with my normal ISP. Then I tried NetZero again and it failed. A full review of their getting started and installation instructions provided no clue, after all it had just worked. I guessed at the problem and was right. Because I used the NT dialer (Dial Up Networking) to dial my normal ISP, it was left on that setting (connection entry) when I went back to log on with NetZero the second time. Apparently, you have to manually set the NT Dial Up Networking dialer to the NetZero entry before invoking the NetZero software.

The next day, I installed the software on another NT machine. When you run the NetZero software, the first thing it does is ask you if you are already a NetZero member. I said yes, which was true. Big mistake. The dialing process hung. I guessed correctly at this problem too - there was no entry for NetZero in the NT dialer (Dial-up Networking) on this machine. The install process does not create one and if you say you are a NetZero member, it assumes there is one. I created one manually using the instructions from their web site (www.netzero.net).

FYI: NetZero does not support the X2 protocol for 56K modem connections. An X2 modem will connect at a maximum speed of 33Kbps. They do support V90 and K56flex which have worked fine for me.

October 27, 1999. I dialed twice, got the connection completed message, then it died. No browser started up, no message about it loading, no NetZero dialer software and NO error messages at all. It just vanished. The phone number I dialed was (212) 202-3473.

In choosing an access number they have two cities: "Manhattan" and "NY 212". One has a single area code 212 number, the other has two other area code 212 numbers. There should only be one category.

Very often it does not connect to the Internet. I dial, get a message from the dialer that says it connected, the web browser gets started and that’s it. The initial web page at Looksmart never loads and neither does the ad window. This has been consistent over the first two weeks of using the product. My gut feel is that it successfully connects only about 40% of the time but I have not kept detailed records.

It takes a very long time to get connected. After connecting to NetZero, it starts up your web browser at the NetZero home page and it takes a very long time to load. You then have to wait for the ad window to start up which also takes a long time. Not until both the ad window and the NetZero start page have fully loaded are you completely connected to the Internet. Many times it has died in a half-connected state. The NetZero dialer has a status message of "loading" while the NetZero home page and ad window are starting up and they often never finish and I have to log off and try to connect again.

Moving the ad window is difficult. Rather than a standard Windows title bar which is easy to grab, drag and drop, you have to grab the window in a very small section at the top middle.

November 5, 1999. When AOL has a software update, it pushes it to the user when they log off. Not NetZero. A couple weeks after I started using NetZero, I experienced the first software upgrade. It pushes the update to the user at logon time, after loading the initial web page but before loading the ad window. As soon as you log on it starts to download the update and forces you to log off to apply the software update. When you handle something worse than AOL, you are really doing a bad job.

The NetZero v2.2 Dialer

Note: This has since been superceded by the v2.2.2 dialer and by the version 3 dialer, both of which look different.

November 6, 1999. Using v2.0.2 of the NetZero software. On a laptop running Windows 98, I switched pccard modems from the original one being used when NetZero was installed (28.8) to a faster 56K (K56flex) modem. The first use of NetZero after this switcheroo failed to dial at all. There is no way in the Netzero dialer to tell it which modem to use or even to see which modem it is going to use. This is what threw me for a minute. Eventually it occurred to me to change the DUN connectoid for Netzero to use the other modem and this fixed the problem, but had the NetZero dialer at least told me which modem definition is was using, the reason for the connection failure would have been obvious. I suspect this would also happen under Windows NT4. Should you get a message from the Netzero dialer program that there was no dial tone detected, then this might be your problem.

November 6, 1999. It does not work well with Netscape for me. I like to keep the ad window in the top right corner of the screen and this covers the STOP button in Navigator. In contrast, IE5 lets you customize the browser toolbar so that you can uncover the STOP button and still have ad window in top right corner. The ad window also gets in the way when you want to save a bookmark with Navigator.

I constantly switch between dialing with NetZero and dialing with my regular ISP. In this environment, with Netscape Messenger, the outgoing mail server is a constant annoyance. Every time I switch from my ISP to NetZero, I have to tell Netscape to use the NetZero outgoing E-mail server (smtp.netzero.net). Netscape does allow for different users with different profiles, which would solve this problem, but they can not share a single inbox which is what I want to do.

November 7, 1999. The ad window (aka zeroport) started acting up as soon as I changed from viewing icons to viewing words. When the mouse moves over the ad window it no longer turns into a live link. I can't right click on the window. I can't grab it at the top middle to move it. As I write this, its stuck in the middle of my screen and there is nothing I can do to get rid of it. All clicks on the window (right and left) result in a error beep and no action at all. Ten minutes later a window pops up for customizing the ticker. I click on save and exit and after a minute or two, things returned to normal. Beats me.

November 7, 1999. Netzero software version 2.0.1 running on NT4 workstation. Dialing into Netzero it made a modem connection, it started up the web browser and went to the NZ home page. I could surf the web just fine, but the ad window never opened up. After a few minutes, the NetZero dialer still said “loading….”. I guess eventually it gave up trying to load the ad window, but rather than put out some type of error or warning message, the NetZero software just vanished. Poof. Gone into thin air with no trace.

The NetZero dialer program does not show up in either the Windows task bar or the system tray on either NT4 or on Windows 98 (the only two systems I've used with it). What are they hiding?

November 10, 1999. Netzero software version 2.0.2 running on NT4 workstation. When Netzero starts up you get a splash screen and then nothing for a few seconds. Its hard to imagine what their programmers were thinking: "lets run our application and make it vanish so that new users have no clue what happened." Anyway, you get used to it, but… One day, on a system with very high cpu usage, it never came back after vanishing. So I double-clicked on the Netzero icon again. Same thing. I double-clicked on the desktop icon a third time. Same thing, splash screen and nothing. No indication in the taskbar that anything is running. Then the cpu load on the system went down and there was the Netzero dialer window in the middle of my screen. I closed it and .... viola, another dialer window. The program had started three copies of itself. Two problems with this.

November 17, 1999. I can live with the ads, it seems a fair tradeoff for net access. But I hate the moving ads, they are very distracting. There is one ad in particular, that flashes "Winner" in various colors very quickly. I hate it so much that I'm tempted to try another free ISP. And I refuse to click on it, so I'll never know what company its an ad for. Alot of the ads are very animated and distracting.

December 12, 1999. NetZero software version 2.0.3 running on NT4. Tried to dial in, but three times in a row it timed out waiting for a response from the PPP peer (or some message similar to this). I think the phone number that I was using is no longer valid - I had noticed that on other machines it no longer appeared in the list of available numbers in my area code (212 - 812-9735). I was right, but ... I chose a new phone number and then the dialer hung. I click on CANCEL and then try to connect again. Again the dialer hung, it never even dialed. I exit the dialer and re-run the dialer and all is well. Seems like it cant handle the new phone number without being restarted.

Often when I right click on a link in a web page with the intention of opening the link in a new browser window, the popup menu is covered up by the Netzero ad window. This seems to happen much more in Netscape Navigator than in MSIE, but I'm not sure why. To get around it, you have to scroll the web page a bit up or down and right click again.

January 6, 2000. The software updated itself to v2.2 on one of the 3 PCs that I have installed on. No gripe, just a note.

January 9, 2000. NetZero software version 2.0.3 running on NT4. After logging on, the Netzero dialer said it was downloading file nzdist.zip (pretty sure, but not 100% sure about the file name) after logging on and before seeing the ad window. Then the NetZero dialer restarted itself. For good luck I restarted Windows NT and dialed again. Again, it downloaded the same file after connecting and then again disconnected and restarted itself. I dialed a third time and it failed to connect, the software disappeared (I wasn't watching for error messages). The fourth time, it connected and logged on fine, but the ad window was full size again (I always have it set to use the icons option, which makes the window smaller).

January 10, 2000. I had to dial in four times before getting a working connection.

January 12, 2000. Another machine I use with NetZero got auto-updated to v2.2 from v2.0.3. Every time they do this, they reset the ad window back to full size (I normally have the View->Icons option set).

January 13, 2000. Netzero carried an ad for the free AltaVista ISP service. Not a gripe, just a surprise.

January 14, 2000. The software has gotten more reliable at making net connections, but its still not as reliable as my regular ISP. Also, it takes much longer than a regular ISP to log on to the Internet as you have to wait for both the NetZero LookSmart home page and the ad window to load.

January 15, 2000. I tested the wasted bandwidth due to the NetZero ad window. On an NT 4 machine (at SP3) I monitored NetZero with the NT Performance Monitor. NetZero software was version 2.2. The only thing running was the NetZero ad window, no web browser, no AOL Instant Messenger, no Email program, nothing else. I waited a couple minutes after logging on just in case it did any initialization processing and then I cleared the display in the NT Performance Monitor which also resets the stats. The object being monitored was "RAS Total" and the graph time was 200.000, which is 2 seconds in English. The two stats being monitored were Bytes Received per second and Bytes Transmitted per second. I watched it for about 15 minutes or so.

For comparison purposes I logged on to my paid provider, IGN, using the IBM Global Network Dialer program and watched it in the same environment on the same machine for 16 minutes. It did not receive one byte during that whole time, which is what I expected. It did, however, transmit some data which was a surprise. Some day I'll have to learn how to trace this as I wonder why it was phoning home. There were four instances of it sending data, but the amount was brutally trivial. The average bytes transmitted per second was about 1. No spike of transmission was higher than 300 bytes per second at its peak.

January 16, 2000. No newsgroups. I tried to access two different Usenet news servers after dialing into NetZero and got rejected. One was a public news server at Microsoft, so I'm pretty sure the rejection was from NetZero.

January 20, 2000. I ran the performance tests as above (from Jan. 15) on a Windows 98 machine. The NetZero software was a version 2.2. I used the Windows 98 System Monitor and watched the dial-up adapter for bytes transmitted/second and bytes received/second. As before, I waited a few minutes after initially logging on and watched it for about 15 minutes. The connection speed reported by the Windows 98 dialer was 48,000 bps. As before peaks of data transmission occurred at the same time for both sending and receiving data.

Almost every spike of received data was 2,000 bytes/second (16,000 bits/second), some spikes were over 3,000 bytes second (24,000 bits/second) and there were some spikes of only 1,000 bytes/second. The highest spike was 3,541 bytes/second (28,328 bits/second).

The highest peak for transmitted data was 352 bytes/second (2,816 bits/second). Most spikes for transmitted data were between 200 and 300 bytes/second.

February 9, 2000. After not using NetZero for a while, I had trouble logging in. The dialer got to the point where is says "loading..." and hung. There were no bytes at all coming into my machine according to the NT4 Dialup Networking monitor. After about 4 minutes, I gave up and re-dialed. This time it connected.

February 13, 2000. Netzero is not compatible with Windows 2000 according to an article I read in the San Jose Mercury News. Specifically, the problem is with their dialer program. I have not verified this myself.

February 25, 2000. Today was the first time I used NetZero after installing a personal firewall (ZoneAlarm). Every time that I sent an e-mail message thru their outbound SMTP e-mail server, they in turn, tried to query my pc to learn more about it. ZoneAlarm blocked access to the IDENT port (113) from four different NetZero computers during the course of my sending a bunch of outbound messages. The computers that tried to contact my machine were 209.247.163.60, 61, 62 and 64. This is not normal behavior for an outbound SMTP e-mail server.

March 2, 2000. This was my first use of v2.2.1 (under Windows 98). The new version required me to chose a local access phone number again, even though the prior version of the software already had a local access number. There still are two categories for "Manhattan, NY" and "New York (212), NY" that both have phone numbers in area code 212. As soon as I logged off, NetZero crashed with:

Installed version 2.2.2 on a Windows 98 Second Edition computer. During the installation it warned me that Client for Microsoft Networks was not installed. So? It doesn't say why I should care. The rest of the installation went fine and it works on the computer.

April 21, 2000. I re-ran the performance tests to compare them to BlueLight running on the same computer. The test machine had a celeron cpu running at 366MHz, 64 meg of RAM, a V90 modem and was running Windows 98 Second Edition. As before I used the Windows System Monitor and this time looked at cpu usage in addition to bytes received/second and bytes transmitted/second as reported by the dialup adapter.

The machine connected at 52,000bps and was running no Internet applications while it was being monitored. Initially the cpu usage was about 5% and the bytes transmitted per second hovered around 220. The bytes recieved per second was about 5,000 second which equates to 40,000 bits/second. After about 15 minutes or so cpu usage dropped to almost zero. The bytes received/second changed to spikes rather than a constant stream. The spikes are brief and each one is about 2,500 bytes.

Email: Installed version 2.2.2 on another Windows 98 Second Edition computer. Nowhere during the installation process or the signup process did it provide any information about configuring my POP email program for use with the service. A casual user might not even be aware that email is a service provided by NetZero. The first time you click on the ad window (zeroport) to get your email it automatically configures your email program. After this auto-configuration, I shut down and restarted the computer. The next time I requested email it went to auto-configure my email program (Netscape Messenger v4.72) a second time. The first time I requested email, the ad window (zeroport) said that I had 4 new messages. I really had 7, all of them from NetZero.

Dialer: The v2.2.2 dialer does not support the concept of primary and backup phone numbers (the BlueLight dialer does). The dialer also does not indicate the phone number it will dial until it actually starts to dial. Finally, there is no way to re-arrange the list of phone numbers (local access numbers in your area code). If, for example, you get a couple busy signals on a particular phone number you can't just move it to the bottom of the list so that you and the dialer still know about it and can use it later if necessary. Instead you are forced to delete the phone number entirely.

The v2.2.2 dialer violates a couple of Windows standards, as did earlier versions of the dialer. It does not show up on the Windows task bar. It does not minimize itself when you ask the operating system to minimize all windows. Also, the ad window does not immediately shut down when you click on the X in the upper right corner. Instead it forces you to look at one final ad while it asks you if you really really want to log off.

The upgrade of NetZero from version 2.2.2 to version 3 caused an effect similar to one observed with BlueLight - it moved the icons along the bottom of a Windows 98 desktop up about an inch. This left the bottom inch of the Windows 98 desktop with no icons at all. As part of the upgrade, the ad window is expanded out to an ad stripe that runs fully across the screen and this is probably what caused the icons to move.

Netzero vanished. Shortly after logging on, the ad window disappeared in a flash and I was no longer on-line. No messages or warnings were issued. It was Netzero v2.2.2 on an NT machine at Service Pack 3.

I downloaded version 3.0.2 of the Netzero software today and installed it under Windows 98.

The first problem was with the download itself. There are two versions of the software available for download, one big file (over 4 meg) and four small files (just over 1 meg each) designed to fit on floppy disks. As I was downloading the software on the computer where it was going to be installed, I opted for the one big file. No go. Despite trying multiple times, the download would never even start. That is, I never even got the window which asks if you want to save the file to disk. The four floppy disk sized files worked and I downloaded them to my hard disk.

FYI: You can use the four floppy disk sized files without floppy disks. I downloaded all four files to my hard disk and ran them from the hard disk - no problem.

The first few times I tried to use the software to dial the Internet, it failed. I had told it that I was an existing customer and provided my userid/password. Figuring the first phone number was busy (there are four in my area code), I deleted it from the list of candidate phone numbers and tried again. The second phone number also failed to connect.

The problem was poor software design. The computer had two modems defined to the operating system and rather than asking the user to chose one of the two modems, the NetZero software arbitrarily chose the first one. It also did not do any sanity checking on this modem, it couldn't have, as it no longer was physically attached to the computer. When I edited the Dial-up networking connectoid and changed it to use the correct modem, everything was fine. The NetZero software does not tell you which modem definition it is using or even display to the user a list of the modems defined to the operating system.

When the NetZero software starts up, the initial splash screen says its version Z3. However, the first real window of the application says that it is v3.0.2. Two names for the same thing.

Privacy: The NetZero software installation process includes three separate documents the user is supposed to read, agree to, and click to acknowledge agreement. Below is an excerpt from one of these documents. It is probably typical of free ISPs.

While you are using the NetZero Service we collect information regarding the Web sites you visit, your interactions with those sites and the telephone number used to log in to the Service. Our Service implements our own unique technology which builds a database of the types of sites you visit while you are online.

More problems today with version 3.0.2 on the above Windows 98 computer. After I logged off the Internet and NetZero, the ad window did not go away, but remained displayed on the desktop. It could not be moved and did not respond any more to close requests. I restarted the computer.

I added a new NetZero userid to the dialer program because the computer in question will be shared by multiple NetZero users. The first time I dialed on to the Internet with the new userid, the ad window opened up as a full stripe along the bottom of the screen. As seen before this stripe is resident on the desktop and as such caused desktop icons that were on the bottom of the screen to shift up an inch or two.

On a computer running Windows 98 Second Edition, I tried dialing with v3.0.2 a couple times. Both times it started to dial, I got the TV screen image that displays the phone number its dialing, then back to the initial logon window. No error messages, no explanation. I just didn't want to dial. For good luck, I restarted the computer in between dial attempts. Not knowing what to do when faced again with the Logon window, I clicked on the Connect button a second time. Both times this caused NetZero to disappear. However, it was still running and dialing and did connect to the Internet.

The first time it connected it had reset the ad window, yet again, from the icon based display I prefer in the top right hand corner to a full ad stripe positioned along the bottom of the screen. This causes all the icons that normally reside at the bottom of the Windows 98 desktop to be moved. I think the software updated itself after the first dial attempt because every version/release upgrade seems to make it forget the preferences for displaying the ad window. However, after a reboot, NetZero still said it was v3.0.2 in the initial Logon window, so I don't know why it reset the preferences.

After the first connection was established, there was alot of downloading going on before the ad window eventually displayed. While I was waiting, I started up IE5 and was customizing the display of icons on the toolbar (right click on the toolbar and select Customize...). NetZero started up IE to display its home page while I was in the middle of customizing. Not a good thing. IE5 crashed, but in a controlled way.

Then it dawned on me to try another NetZero userid (on the same computer) and all worked well. It dialed normally and displayed the TV set window while doing so. However, this userid also defaulted back to the ad stripe along the entire bottom of the screen.

On a computer running NT4 and NetZero v2.2.2, I dialed onto the Internet in the hope that it would automatically upgrade itself to version 3 (NetZero on this machine had not been used lately). I had no intention of doing anything online, rather I was just going to let it sit connected and hopefully watch it download a steady stream of bits for the software upgrade.

The first time I dialed, it hung halfway through the connection process. The initial web page never fully loaded. The dialer status said "connection completed", but of course, it had not. ZoneAlarm showed that there was no traffic in or out, which the lights on my external modem confirmed. Eventually it died on its own. The dialer was no longer active. There was no error message produced (but admittedly I was not watching it every second). I redialed and it connected fine.

As with earlier versions, NetZero v3.0.4 caused a bunch of icons on my Windows desktop to be moved. In the past it had only effected the icons on the bottom of the screen because its ad stripe decides that it owns the bottom inch or so of the screen and everyone else just has to move. This time, however, it also caused some icons on the right hand side and the top of the screen to move.

The first time I ran v3.0.4 it complained about some of the phone numbers not being correctly set up as to dialing area codes. I suspect this is a bug, because version 2.2.2 had no problem dialing these phone numbers even though they were not in my home area code.

I canceled out of the dialer after it complained because I wanted to take a screen shot of the error message. Re-running the dialer and clicking on the CONNECT button however did not produce the same message, instead it hung NetZero. I had to use Task Manager to kill the zcast.exe process.

While NetZero is dialing, version 3 displays a TV set. Like the ad window, this TV set wants to always be on top of all other windows. At one point while it was dialing, ZoneAlarm popped up a message about blocking access to my computer. ZoneAlarm too wants its warning message to always be on top of all other windows. It was interesting to watch the two of them fight it out.

An annoying problem with this TV set window is that because it insists on being on top, you can't run many programs. If you try to use START -> Programs -> etc. to run a program, you can't. The list of programs is obscured by the TV set window.

Click. Click. Click. What gives? I usually have my computer speakers off, but today they were on. NetZero clicks. It seems like it clicks every time the ad changes. Very annoying.

On a computer running Windows 98 and NetZero v3.0.4, someone I know could not connect to the Internet at all. This problem has been ongoing for over a week. The big gripe here is that the dialer is not doing any fallback processing. It dials one number, fails to connect and stops. It does not re-try the failing number. It does not try any other phone numbers.

This problem has occurred with two different access numbers in area code 212 so far. The computer can dial into the Internet using another ISP, so the problem is not with the modem or the phone line.

From Windows 98 with NetZero v3.0.2. I could not log on. A connection to the Internet was established at 50,667 bps but soon thereafter, NetZero shut down the connection complaining that it could not establish a connection to the NetZero server. It had verified my userid/password.

I deleted the phone number that it had just used and tried to dial again. The dialer disappeared. I re-started the dialer and tried to connect again. Again, the dialer disappeared. However, it continued to dial and made a full NetZero connection.

A few minutes later, I logged off and tried to log on again. This time it opened my web browser (IE5) such that it filled only half the screen and could not be maximized. I could not stretch the window by dragging it with the mouse and could not maximize it using any of the normal methods. I minimized it, then maximized it and this time, it really was maximized.

I don't use NetZero often, and was trying it today only because of the problems another person in my area code was having in getting connected. For a long time the pattern has been that the first use of NetZero after an absence of a couple months is problematical.

Other Opinions

Study shows free Net services aren't worth it August 2, 2000 by CNet.
Free Internet service providers have been hit with failures and with criticism in a recent industry report,
renewing questions about the viability of such services.

The free ISP review web site run by Dawn McGatney gave NetZero a "Check it out" rating. (Note: this web site seems to have disappeared. July 2002).

Another site with reviews of free ISPs is www.shreve.net/~graff/freeisp.htm (Note: this web site seems to have disappeared. July 2002).

Read an article by CNet from August 7, 2001 about the remaining free/cheap ISPs.