Wednesday, August 02, 2006
No more Betas for me
Good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, your weekly guide to the internet. I am Steven Lang.
A few weeks ago I mentioned that Microsoft has just released a third Beta version of Internet Explorer seven. A Beta version means that the product is still being tested and is not yet ready for market. If you believed the party-line about the new product – IE 7 was set to regain the initiative from Firefox – my current favourite internet browser.
Now not being a great technical expert, I have long since learned never to touch the first Beta version of any product – that is for the geeks who love finding bugs and ways of eliminating them.
My experience has been that sometimes the second, but almost always the third Beta version is just about ready for the market. The overwhelming majority of problems are invariably sorted out by the third Beta version.
So, I decided to try out the latest version of IE7 – knowing full well that it was still in the testing stage – but I had already used so many Beta versions before – what can go wrong?
That was where my nightmare began.
First of all you can no longer get internet explorer on the giveaway CDs that come with certain computer magazines. So you have to download it from a dedicated web site.
Click on download – and a screen pops up telling you to disable your firewall and other security elements. This is making me nervous already. Why do they want me to do this?
Next, it tells you that before you can download IE7 it will check to see if your copy of Windows is legit. This is astounding.
Would Ford say that you cannot install a Ford brake pad until they have checked that you have a genuine Ford clutch plate?
Wait! It get’s worse! Then it says that in order to verify the legitimacy of your Windows XP – it has to download another piece of check-up software before it will even think of letting you download IE7.
Right - so I jump through the hoops and I give control of my computer to the boys from Redwood.
I then spend half an hour unsuccessfully trying to download the program. Eventually I am sitting with Microsoft plug ins monitoring my machine and half a downloaded IE7.
So out of sheer frustration, I make my next big mistake, I try to remove IE7 and all the other stuff that Microsoft has put on my machine.
The next thing is that half my programs stop working because two strange DILL files – files with dot D L L extensions are missing. And guess what? You can’t download the missing files because without them you can’t download anything.
Of course, I thought that I had messed up badly, so I used another computer to visit some chat rooms to find out how to solve my problem.
I found that many other people had experienced the exact same catastrophic series of events and that the only way to resolve them is to download the missing files through another computer and then install them on the problem machine.
I have now resolved not to fiddle with Beta versions of anything and for the foreseeable future I will use Firefox on my home computer.
That wraps up today’s edition of Cybersurf – be sure to join me again next Wednesday for more on the best of the web.
A few weeks ago I mentioned that Microsoft has just released a third Beta version of Internet Explorer seven. A Beta version means that the product is still being tested and is not yet ready for market. If you believed the party-line about the new product – IE 7 was set to regain the initiative from Firefox – my current favourite internet browser.
Now not being a great technical expert, I have long since learned never to touch the first Beta version of any product – that is for the geeks who love finding bugs and ways of eliminating them.
My experience has been that sometimes the second, but almost always the third Beta version is just about ready for the market. The overwhelming majority of problems are invariably sorted out by the third Beta version.
So, I decided to try out the latest version of IE7 – knowing full well that it was still in the testing stage – but I had already used so many Beta versions before – what can go wrong?
That was where my nightmare began.
First of all you can no longer get internet explorer on the giveaway CDs that come with certain computer magazines. So you have to download it from a dedicated web site.
Click on download – and a screen pops up telling you to disable your firewall and other security elements. This is making me nervous already. Why do they want me to do this?
Next, it tells you that before you can download IE7 it will check to see if your copy of Windows is legit. This is astounding.
Would Ford say that you cannot install a Ford brake pad until they have checked that you have a genuine Ford clutch plate?
Wait! It get’s worse! Then it says that in order to verify the legitimacy of your Windows XP – it has to download another piece of check-up software before it will even think of letting you download IE7.
Right - so I jump through the hoops and I give control of my computer to the boys from Redwood.
I then spend half an hour unsuccessfully trying to download the program. Eventually I am sitting with Microsoft plug ins monitoring my machine and half a downloaded IE7.
So out of sheer frustration, I make my next big mistake, I try to remove IE7 and all the other stuff that Microsoft has put on my machine.
The next thing is that half my programs stop working because two strange DILL files – files with dot D L L extensions are missing. And guess what? You can’t download the missing files because without them you can’t download anything.
Of course, I thought that I had messed up badly, so I used another computer to visit some chat rooms to find out how to solve my problem.
I found that many other people had experienced the exact same catastrophic series of events and that the only way to resolve them is to download the missing files through another computer and then install them on the problem machine.
I have now resolved not to fiddle with Beta versions of anything and for the foreseeable future I will use Firefox on my home computer.
That wraps up today’s edition of Cybersurf – be sure to join me again next Wednesday for more on the best of the web.
