My wife's Dell laptop is running Vista much to my chagrin. The cursing you hear across the Internet is probably me every time I have to resolve an issue and am forced to deal with interminable waits with that darn little blue circle, or worse sudden black screens (worse in my view than the dreaded blue screen) where the screen suddenly goes black for reasons only understood by the Microsoft engineers who designed this piece of drek.
The other day out of the blue, my wife complained that she couldn't open any sites using Internet Explorer. She normally uses Firefox, so this isn't necessarily a problem, but she needs to use IE to access her online course materials, so in this case it was a huge problem. I started playing around with it and I couldn't get it to work either. I tried:
- Closing IE and restarting. That didn't do anything.
- I tried clearing the cache (once I figured out how do that with the latest version of IE). Nothing there either.
- I tried rebooting the entire system. Still nothing.
But I did notice something strange as I was rebooting. The IE icon was flashing on the desktop. Still not sure if that meant anything, but it seemed significant, so when the machine (finally) restarted--I grew older, wiser waiting--I opened the Start menu and searched for "Internet Explorer."
There were two choices, your plain vanilla IE and IE without Add-ons. I tried the plain vanilla and still no access, so desperate for a solution I tried IE without Add-ons and sure enough I was able to access the internet again with IE. I closed it; opened plain vanilla IE and the problem was resolved.
Not sure what happened there, but apparently opening it without add-ons cleared whatever issue IE was having accessing the internet. I have never hidden by total disdain for the latest generation of Microsoft products, whether it's Office 2007, Vista or now IE. All seem like perfect excuses to me to buy a Mac or to take a good look at Linux and open source solutions. In the mean time, don't mind that occasional screaming you hear, it's only me dealing with my wife's Vista laptop.
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