Home & Small Office Computer Guide

Windows Vista is one year old this week and it hasn’t been a very happy birthday.

Take up of the new operating system has not been what Microsoft were expecting and they are still seeing plenty of resistance from business and educational institutions.

Here in Australia savvy buyers are still tracking down PCs and laptops that come loaded with Windows XP and in the United Kingdom the agency that governs educational technology has advised schools to keep Windows Vista and Office 2007 out of the classroom and the administration offices. You can read that story here.

Meanwhile major retailers here in Australia aren’t helping Microsoft much. One major chain is selling laptops loaded with Windows Vista but only half the RAM recommended for the operating system.

In the last week or so we’ve been coming across a number of people who have been having some serious problems with Internet Explorer … and usually Internet Explorer 7.

The problem has reared it’s ugly head when users with Internet Explorer 7 have tried to log on to their Gmail account. Instead of seeing the log-in screen it seems that most of them have been seeing a blank page.

One of our clients gave us a call during breakfast on Saturday morning when he found for the third day in row he couldn’t access Gmail at all. We went round and fixed the problem in a couple of minutes.

If you’re having that problem all you have to do is uninstall Internet Explorer 7 via the Control Panel and then reboot the computer. When the computer restarts it will pick up IE6 and that version of Internet Explorer sees Gmail with no problems at all.