When I headed for Alabama last week, I knew that my mom didn't have internet access at home. I also knew that there ain't a lot of internet cafés in the area. I figured I would just get a local access number from my ISP and deal with dialup for a few days . . . but then I remembered that my MacBook doesn't have an internal modem. What to do? Of course, I could have done without internet access for a week. NOT. So I thought about it and decided to give Rovair a try. Rovair rents mobile wireless cards: you order on their website (it’s easiest to let them choose the card that’s best for your location and system), give them an address to ship the card to . . . and then on the day you designate a little FedEx package shows up at that address containing the card, a CD with the necessary software for your system, and a pre-addressed, prepaid FedEx envelope to send the stuff back. They chose a Sprint card for me, and it worked great. It wasn’t super-fast, but it deserved to be called broadband, and throughout the whole week it never dropped the connection. The only small glitches were in the software, which was a little unstable and caused one forced restart — the only time I’ve ever had to reboot this computer (or any of my Macs for the past five years). But the CD containd an uninstaller, so at the end of the week I uninstalled the software, packed up the card, and dropped the package off in a FedEx box. Based on my one experience, I’d say that Rovair is a very good service.

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