STFU && RTFM

A user logged a support ticket, saying that she was having problems playing streaming video in Internet Explorer. According to the ticket, it “doesn’t work”. The user would be away from work, but had left her passwords “in a secure place” (read: under her keyboard)…
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I went to her computer, logged on, and tested a few video sites such as YouTube etc. I was unable to reproduce the problem. I sent the user a message, telling her to contact me when she returned to work.
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When she returned, I had a look at her computer. It turned out that her problem wasn’t that it didn’t work, but rather that the colors were all distorted and inverted-looking. The error only occured on sites that streamed video for replay in Windows Media Player.
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I checked out what version of WMP she was running, and predictably enough, she was running an ancient version of WMP. Armed with this knowledge, I updated WMP, and lo and behold; the problem was gone.

The next version of Microsofts Internet Explorer is currently in public beta. Many of the beta testers are reporting that they are unable to uninstall the beta. The reason? They are running Windows XP SP3.
 
Now, you can still uninstall IE8, it just takes a little more time, and effort. The first step to doing so is uninstalling SP3, which in turn should allow you to uninstall IE8.

Following monday’s post a colleague of mine sent me the below picture. Although I’ll grant you it is oversimplifying things more than a bit, it still has a vein of truth in it, not to mention the fact that it is more than slightly amusing…
 

(Click the image to see the full size)

Like a few of my previous posts, today’s post is a direct result of my girlfriend using my computer. After she’d been using it to check her email and so on, I noticed that, even though my account was logged into GMail notifier, or even if it wasn’t logged in at all, it’d notify me of email that patently belonged in her inbox, and indeed was not existent in my inbox.
 
I was puzzled. I use Firefox as my default web browser, and so does my girlfriend, usually. Turns out she hadn’t been the day in question, instead she’d been using Internet Explorer.
 
Luckily, this is a simple problem to resolve, and here’s how:
 

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. Go to Tools > Internet Options
3. Click Delete files

 
It turns out that GMail Notifier ties into Internet Explorer, using cookies.

When accessing applications through Citrix Web Interface, users sometimes get the following error message:

 
Having researched many possible solutions, the fix I’ve found is this:
 
1: Open Internet Explorer
2: Click Tools > Internet Options
3: On the General tab, click the Delete Files button
4: Restart the browser
 
The cause seems to be that Citrix times out due to not finding the ICA-file because there are too many files in the cache.

Like me, you’ve probably been using the internet for a while, and may have noticed that sometimes Internet Explorer has a “provided by”-tag, looking something like this:
 

 
Well, I wondered how they did this, and found out. This is how to brand your Internet Explorer, in three simple steps.:
 
First, open the “run”-dialog box from the start menu, and type “gpedit.msc”. Press OK.
 
Second, in the Group Policy Editor window that opens, find the setting called “User Configuration\Windows Settings\Internet Explorer Maintenance\Browser User Interface” like so:
 

 
Thirdly, open the setting called “Browser Title”, and edit it in the dialog box that follows, much like this:
 

 
Click “OK”, and Hey Presty!, you’re done.
 
What will it look like you ask? Here’s how: