My friend is running Windows 98 on a PC he bought in 2000. Not surprisingly, his computer is dying. I'm sending him an older G4 tower mac. I'll pre-install Panther or Tiger for him.

He has a bunch of old emails and photos stored on AOL, probably in an older version of the AOL software. He's still using AOL. (Yes, I still want to help him.)

How can we move his AOL info over?

He's not local, so I have step him through this over the phone. I can install anything we need before shipping. I can step him through putting the old hard drive in the Mac as an IDE slave. It's what happens after that I'm fuzzy on. Might AOL recognize his old files?

Thanks in advance.

There are a few free programs that can convert aol to outlook, etc., but I could not get them to work. There are also some that cost money, which I did not try. If you search on google, it shouldn't be hard to find them. If I had it to do over again, I would just type them out of the address book. Seriously. Don't even try to copy and paste, just type them. I tried to go from os 9 to os X also, and failed miserably too (even though it should be possible, and partially worked). I think it all comes down to an effort by aol to prevent users from leaving for other services. It unfortunately affects efforts to upgrade too. If someone else has an easy solution, I would be irritated, as I wasted hours. Look for the solution that mentions the mail info being stored on aol's servers, and a way to force it to update the info on your computer. I think that was the way I at least got partial success.

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Good luck! kj.

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