MSN Premium: Enough to Fill a Butterfly Net.

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Author: Brown, Marge

The ISP battle between AOL and MSN continues, with broadband serving as the new front. Microsoft announced its MSN Premium service right around New Year's. The company continues to roll out exclusive content (and those ubiquitous butterfly ads) to woo subscribers.

The price is certainly attractive: MSN Premium costs just $9.95 a month for users who already have a broadband service provider, or $39.95 to $49.95 a month when you sign up for broadband through one of Microsoft's partners. That's a shot across the bow of AOL 9.0 Optimized, which runs $14.95 per month if you already have an ISP or $54.95 with AOL-supplied broadband service.

Sophisticated Internet users will find the crisp and consistent interface (with its denser text format) more pleasant than AOL's graphical multimedia interface, which appeals more to entry-level users. MSN Premium's primary navigation tool, a customizable toolbar at the top of the screen, carries over from Version 8. You can set it to show your most frequently used features (such as News, Search, and Maps) and display them as text or small, medium, or large icons.

Also enhanced in this release are the Dashboard and My MSN navigation aids. The Dashboard now gives you quick access to photo slide shows, flags unread e-mail, shows calendar events, and even delivers traffic alerts. Another nice touch: You can opt to keep the Dashboard open within any application.

Customization options for the My MSN home page let you change the page's format, color scheme, theme, content, and more. For example, you might want headline news, related videos, and weather in the forefront; or maybe sports reports, incoming Hotmail messages, and movie video clips instead. You can also drag and drop content modules, moving them around the My MSN page to suit your needs. We prefer this free-form customization approach to the more packaged AOL approach.

Integrated versions of McAfee VirusScan and McAfee Personal Firewall Plus, as well as e-mail filters, a pop-up guard, and parental controls, provide peace of mind. MSN filters junk e-mail at the server, but you can also categorize items as junk, opting to have some or all reported back to the system's filter to train it.

Pop-up Guard, which lets you control those pesky ads that jump onto your screen, has some clever settings options. For example, you can block popups entirely or have the utility show an unobtrusive thumbnail of the ads it has blocked (useful if you are indeed in the market to refinance your mortgage).

Parental controls are member-specific and let you manage e-mail, instant messaging, calendar entries, and Web browsing remotely. The service lets parents approve (or block) sites on the fly and delivers a weekly Online Activity Report so that you can peruse activity by user.

MSN Premium offers a generous ten subaccounts (AOL currently gives subscribers seven). The primary user on an account gets 25MB of e-mail in-box storage plus 10MB for attachments; subaccounts get 10MB and 3MB, respectively. E-mail access features are impressive: You can send, receive, and manage MSN e-mail from MSN Premium, of course, but also from Hotmail and by using the Microsoft Office Outlook Connector for MSN, which is new with MSN Premium. Outlook Connector lets you access your MSN Premium e-mail, calendar, address book, tasks, and notes from within Microsoft Outlook XP and Outlook 2003.

Subscribers will find a wealth of ways to use their accounts beyond simple Web browsing. For example, we used the organization tool in Picture It! Library to insert photos into e-mail messages and upload the images to the Web for 30-day storage â€" a process that makes ad hoc photo sharing a breeze. Photo Story lets you add audio and music to a scries of photos to create a multimedia slide show for sharing via e-mail, IM, or video CD. IM enthusiasts can share photos in real time with MSN Photo Swap (in the included MSN Messenger tool).

Compared with Video@AOL, the MSN Video portion of the service is more limited. For example, in the News category, MSN Video offers NBC News and Business news stories and commentaries. Video@AOL News carries news stories from ABC, AP, and CNN. Moreover, Video@AOI, provides the ability to share videos in IMs and e-mail, to join video-related chat sessions, and to rate videos. Such community features might make the additional cost of AOL 9.0 Optimized worthwhile for those who regularly use the video capabilities of their Internet service.

Of course, Microsoft plans on adding new content continually, so video selection shouldn't deter you. There's a lot to like about MSN Premium, especially for veteran Web users who want the clean, customizable interface, built-in photo-sharing, and Outlook integration.

MSN Premium

Direct price: With user-provided broadband, $9.95 per month; with broadband from Microsoft ISP partner, $39.95 to $49.95 per month. Requires: 256MB RAM; 320MB hard drive space; Microsoft Windows 98, Me, 2000 (with SP2), or XP. Microsoft Corp., www.msn.com. ####@

The service walks you through setting parental controls, and you can set different thresholds for each user.

MSN Premium's e-mail interface is uncluttered and customizable. Note the omnipresent Dashboard to the right of the screen.

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By Marge Brown