Technology

I love my laptop and I am very thankful for it. There were two glitches that caused me some frustration with my operating system, Vista. Yes, Vista had some problems, go figure.

Since I received this laptop as a gift last May--wow! it has been almost a year, there has been a small glitch. Every time I closed an Internet Explorer window a new one would open up. My friend, Deb, who last year invited us to swim in her pool, and whose, power washer I borrowed and whom Nathan called Eb, told me that she had the same problem.

It was an annoying problem, because I would click on the "X" to close the window and it would close with an error message and a new window would open up. The quick fix was to open up new links in Tabs rather than a whole new window. This method allowed the user, in this case myself, to close window without getting that false error message.

Two days ago another new glitch occurred. The automatic update program found a new version of Adobe Flash Player and it failed to install. I don't know why it did and furthermore I didn't understand why I lost my old version of Flash Player. This meant that I got red x's where there was a video program that required flash drive.

So, I went to the Adobe site to download and install the newest version of their Flash Player, and it wouldn't fully install. I was getting frustrated and confused. I tried downloading to my portable Flash Drive on the desktop and then install to my laptop from the Flash Drive and that failed to work as well.

Yahoo was offering a free download of Internet Explorer 8. My thought was that perhaps the latest version of IE would allow for a clean download and installation of the Adobe Flash Player version 10. Well, it didn't. However, the latest version of IE did stop the window glitch and seemed to load faster. I was happy with that, but I still couldn't play YoVille on Facebook.

So, Saturday morning, I sat down with my laptop and read all the trouble shooting guide information on Adobe again. I was up late Friday night trying to solve the problem by changing security and add-on settings for IE 8. They didn't work. Finally I read the last part of the Trouble Shooting guide and found that the Flash Player program did download, but did not install. I found the program on my C Drive thanks to the troubleshooting guide and was then able to install the program.

Now, my laptop is working better than ever before. Web pages load faster and YoVille seems clearer than before.