Another way-cool tool

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Another interesting resource – is www.skype.com   This is a free internet telephone service that lets you use your computer’s speaker and microphone as the telephone system.  The quality of sound is quite clear whether you talk to your neighbour or some faraway shore.  Having two speakers on your computer system gives you the caller in stereo LOL!  Free download.

I’ll be using it to talk to my daughter this fall when she moves to Afghanistan to save on long-distance charges.  Conference calls between myself and my kids (across the continent and around the world) will be routine.

High speed makes it work really well as dial up can be variable. If lots of people are on your dial-up switch, quality degrades (time lag in transmission) but it improves if there’s nobody on the switch.  I have no trouble with high speed.

It also comes with a chat utility and a file transfer utility. In other words, you can be talking to somebody about a manuscript – make the changes with your word processor on your system while you’re talking and then send that file to them - - all at the same time.  There is an interface to actually dial a landline but I don’t use that at this time.

Again, I have no commercial involvement with this system. It is just free and it works.  Qualifies as a way-cool tool.

Doug