This is in response to post 18212 by Grelber.
With your dialup internet connection there is something you should be aware of. Apple has been migrating more and more of the help and other functions to the internet for years. Help has quietly bee on the leading edge of a major trend. When you or I do a search in help there will very likely be more online than local references. Whether you like it or not this is very much to our advantage because it allows Apple to be constantly expanding, updating, and evolving the Help files without our having to download new help files weekly.
The migration of Help information to the internet is just the tip of the iceberg. Apple recently moved from synchronizing calendars and contacts on multiple devices to sharing calendars and contacts store on the web between multiple computers and iDevices not to mention multiple users and the entire process works a lot better and more smoothly than synchronizing ever did. Even if you don't intend to share your calendars and contacts between devices or users, having critical data like that on Apple's server farms is about as good a backup as you can get and certainly at free the price is right.
If you look at pretty much everything Apple has done in the last few years has been moving toward making the cloud (a.k.a. the internet) an integral part of the desktop. Apple isn't alone in doing this either. All the major players such as Microsoft, Google, and Oracle are moving in the same direction. When iCloud is activated in the next few weeks the line between the desktop and the cloud is going to become a lot fuzzier. In fact the line between my iMac and my iPad is going to become pretty fuzzy too. The day of a computer as an isolated machine is past. Computers are simply one more device in an interconnected network of devices linked together by the internet into a single entity for the creation, collection, and processing of information.
I understand your reluctance to swallow the not insignificant cost of a broadband internet connection. But I urge you to consider the pain you are currently going through because of the huge jump you have made from OS 9 to OS X 10.7. The time is going to come a lot sooner rather than later when you are going to have to make the transition to high speed internet and it will be a lot easier and less traumatic to you if you will make the transition now and take the changes is smaller bites rather than waiting and having to swallow the whole thing in one giant gulp.
