Tired of mailing checks to your long distance phone company? Are you willing to sacrifice either a little time or a little quality for free service? If the answer to either one of these questions is "yes," this is your lucky day.

Using your computer, you can access many free phone services. Most, but not all, require you to have a microphone and speakers or headphones.

One service that doesn't require these is PhoneHog.com. Be warned: To use this service, you'll have to look at more than the snazzy telephone-holding pig on the main site.

You can sign up on PhoneHog.com by filling out the form on its main page. It'll ask you for some personal information. Just make sure you give an accurate e-mail address.

Even if you do lie about the rest, it'll track you down when you use your telephone. So don't feel bad about lying.

Sign up at PhoneHog.com and you will be issued an 800 number for making long distance calls. I tried this service, and it works identically to a prepaid calling card. The one catch? You don't have unlimited minutes.

PhoneHog.com automatically puts 10 minutes on your card when you sign up. Adding additional minutes can be a very painful process. If you are feeling adventuresome, here are four ways you can do it.

First, refer your friends to the service. For every friend you refer who signs up for the service, you'll get a whopping five minutes of call time. Second, view the junk e-mail PhoneHog.com sends you and click on the advertisers' hyperlinks. Third, participate in advertisers' "special offers." I'm not quite sure what these are, but don't do it if there is money involved. Fourth, fill out surveys or click on ad links on your personal PhoneHog.com page.

Whew! And you just wanted to call Dad to borrow some money. Well, as they say in economics, "there's no such thing as a free lunch."

If you don't sacrifice your money, you'll sacrifice your time instead.

If you'd rather sacrifice phone quality than your personal time, there are many Web sites that offer free PC-to-Phone service. With this service, you can make unlimited calls to any telephone number in the country using your computer's microphone and speakers as your telephone. If you have headphones, that's even better.

Although most of these sites have a similar registration process, they don't always have similar service. I tested a number of them and here are my rankings.

Best bet: www.net2phone.com. The person on the other end of the call can understand the person with the microphone fairly well. This is the most important feature of any PC-to-phone service. Although the quality is far from perfect, it is superior to many other competitors. Just be sure to speak loudly, slowly and clearly.

Disadvantages to net2phone.com include the annoying ads that pop up before and after calls.

This is understandable, though, as it is a free service. The company needs to make money somehow.

To sign up for this service, visit net2phone.com. Click on "PC to Phone" on the left sidebar, and then "Download Now." Net2Phone.com will download automatically, giving instructions at every step. Conveniently, it will save a shortcut in your computer's Start menu and on your desktop, if you're using Windows. Thus, there's no need to revisit the Web site every time you want to make a phone call.

Like all other services, net2phone.com will ask for a lot of personal information. Since a lot of it goes directly to advertisers for marketing purposes, I don't feel so bad about lying. Again, just make sure you have an accurate e-mail address.

Net2phone.com will provide you with an account number, and you will supply a PIN number. Keep track of these numbers in case you want to visit the Web site and view your call history.

Better than nothing: This category is a tie between dialpad.com and phonefree.com. Both provide decent service, but mediocre quality. Again, sign up for either one and expect to give your life story in the form of a registration survey.

Dialpad.com, which claims to have more than 11 million users, distinguishes itself by working directly in the Web browser. There is no separate software to download; just visit the Web site to make phone calls. This isn't really an advantage, unless you like visiting Web sites rather than saving programs.

Phonefree.com is very similar to net2phone.com. Again, the difference is quality. If you use this service, be prepared to speak loudly and slowly into your microphone.

Avoid like the plague: iConnectHere.com. Although I haven't used the service lately, I had many bad experiences with it last summer when it was still deltathree.com. I would call a person and could hear him on the line, yet he couldn't hear me. Now, as iConnectHere.com, the service isn't even totally free.

They give you one free hour, then start charging for a service everyone else is giving away. Plus, reading "Powered by deltathree" just makes me shudder.

My recommendation: Download and use service from net2phone.com, and sign up for dialpad.com and phonefree.com as backups. In the world of cyberspace, you never know when a server will go down or a service will be canceled.

Also, regardless of which service you use, be sure to wait a few seconds each time before you say something into the microphone.

There is a slight delay between when you talk into the microphone and when the other person hears it.

My favorite service, eXtremeVoice, was permanently cancelled last week. Too bad. It was a great service, and was going to be the highlight of this column. I'll let you know if it's brought back.

If you have any computer questions, e-mail me and I'll try to answer them in this column. Also, let me know if you have any suggestions for future columns.

Tune in next week. I'll tell you how to get the most out of your computer.