Microsoft Explorer V. 5.00

C Dixon · From: Duluth, GA USA

It never ceases to amaze me this new technological age and what ordinary people have to go through to just exist

I have been for the past few weeks hosting a Christian chatroom on MSN in their "Religion chatrooom category". Everything had worked beautifully. NO problems.

Then last Thursday through out the day, our chatroom was interrupted by an annoucement saying, "We are going to upgrade our chatroom software to make MSN chatrooms the best on the internet. Please be patient".

Shortly there after, I was NO longer able to get into the "Religion" OR "General" category of chatrooms. I could however get into any other category (over a dozen) with NO problem. Just NOT the "religion" or "general" categories.

I began calling MSN's tech support. And the typical baloney that ensued lasted for 4 days. They would do the silly things like have me clear out my history files and temp files. I knew this had NOTHING to do with it. And then they would always say, "there is nothing more we can do!" "Must be your browser!"

Well I got angry last night and called them and said "cancel my account!" Wow!! money doth talk!

They put a engineer on the line. And I must say he was good. And I mean good. He taught me a bundle. After 3 hours of exhaustive research, he discovered the problem.

Seems that there was an advertisement "pointer" in the "General" and "Religion" Catergories that was incompatible, (get this), ONLY with computers having Windows 95 AND the early version of Microsoft Explorer 5.00.

In other words, IF, you had a later version of windows 95 or Microsoft Explorer, you would not exprerience the problem. Wouldn't ya know I had to have them both.

I am happy to say that after a 4 and 1/2 hour download to Explorer 5.50, everything is working like a charm this morning.

Again, it never ceases to amaze me what man hath wrought!!

God help us!

carl

Dave Van Allen · From: Souderton, PA , US , Earth

ah the curse of maintaining "backward compatibility"; and most web designers don't even try....

Internet "content providers" are constantly coming up with new ways of presenting stuff, animations, shockwave, java script extensions etc. they don't care if YOU can't see it, it just looks so insanely great on their 26 inch monitor on their multi gigahertz CPU

just trying to keep one machine up to date to be able to recognise these "improvements" is a chore.

I'm trying to do it for a school district full of users with little understanding beyond, "it doesn't work- on this web page my computer freezes"

Carl, I'm glad you could find someone who could answer the problem for you!

[This message was edited by Dave Van Allen on 05 June 2001 at 09:39 AM.]

Jack Stoner · From: Kansas City, MO

Carl, you have me puzzled. Your e-mail address indicates you are on AOL, however you talk about MSN and cancelling it. Do you have both?, which seems like a waste as it's redundant.

Your problems, tho, could have been excacerbated by the AOL connection, since AOL does their own proprietry thing and many sites have to have special AOL web pages.

As Dave pointed out, backward compatibility is a major problem both in web sites and in operating systems. I am getting ready to redo my WEB site and I'm going to add "frames" to it. I had avoided frames so there wouldn't be any incompatibility problems but now the vast majority of internet users have upgraded their browsers so frames is not a real concern.

Microsoft would love to get away from the backward compatibility thing so they could have one operating system instead of having to maintain the two they have now (2000 and Windows ME). Windows ME was the first consumer version to break with DOS, since you can only run a DOS program in a "DOS Window". Windows XP is supposed be a further break from backward compatibility and closer to the one operating system target. Although there are still DOS and Windows 95 users, in modern technology terms they are both dinosaurs and especially DOS. As the software companies (all - not just Microsoft) develop software that takes advantage of newer hardware technologies, there will come a point where backward compatibility will no longer be a viable option. Do they make the software package so big and unwieldly just to have the backward compatibility? Although this forces users to either upgrade their hardware if they want the latest software, or they have to be content with the older hardware and software (which for many people is perfectly adequate). Running old software on new machines somtimes also gets into compatibility problems.

C Dixon · From: Duluth, GA USA

Jack your ideas, though sound, are incorrect.

Here is more detail to the saga. I do and did have an AOL account. I did not prior to last Sat have an MSN account.

I had been going thru AOL to get to the MSN chatrooms which I am told is a free service of MSN.

When the problem started after the MSN software upgrade, I decided that maybe indeed it was due to the fact I was going through AOL to get to MSN.

It just so happened that MSN is now offering 3 free months of service if you sign up with them. So ole Carl thought "hmmmmmmmm!"

So I called up Saturdy morning and signed up for that 3 mos since it is NOT a contract and can be cancelled at any time.

Guess what? You guessed it. SAME exact problem whether I went through AOL or directtly to MSN.

It was NOT until I threatened to canced my 2 day old account that they DID put an engineer on the phone who DID in fact find the problem as mentioned in the other thread.

Finally this caveat. Would you believe that I can get to MSN quicker by going through AOL? AND-----ANY of the pages load 5 times faster than when I go direct.

Go figger.

carl

Larry Beck · From: Pierre, SD

quote:
Finally this caveat. Would you believe that I can get to MSN quicker by going through AOL? AND-----ANY of the pages load 5 times faster than when I go direct.

There could be a lot of reasons why AOL is faster such as their local modems, better equipment at their POP, fewer hops to their servers, but my money is on cache. (pun intended) Cache technology loads the most popular pages right at AOL so they don't have to wait to fetch pages from the internet. AOL dedicates a lot of server power just to this function.
BTW: POP stands for point of presence.

Jack Stoner · From: Kansas City, MO

Carl, thanks for 'splainin it to me. I was wondering what was going on as I knew you were using AOL.

The problem you had wasn't a common problem and usually 1st level help desks wouldn't know about that. It probably took a 2nd or even 3rd level support person to know what to do.

C Dixon · From: Duluth, GA USA

Some more interesting bit of trivia. When I went to the "Micro-soft" update website, I only dowloaded the latest version of Microsoft Explorer which of course solved my promblems with MSN.

However, since then I have downloaded all of the pertinent updates they offer. And I cannot believe the improvement in performance of my computer now. Even on this forum there is a noticable increase of speed going from one category to the other. Pictures seem to pop up quicker too.

If any of you have an old version of windows and or "Explorer", you may wish do go to the sight and update your computer.

When you do, it looks at what you have and ONLY lists what is available for YOUR computer. This is done AFTER you click on "Update".

I am pleased as punch with what has happened since I downloaded all they had to offer.

If you are interested click here:

http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com

God bless you,

carl

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