Classic British Flight Sim

Hi ian..

Thanks for that explanation The page itself looked no different to IE7 but the toolbars themselves were the problem. I dunno what your setup looks like but I have the very top line showing where I am.. the next line is File, Edit, View e t c.. the next line is Back - Forward, Stop, Refresh e t c.. the line under that is the address line and finally the Google line (it's google now as that's what I use as my default search engine. While the File, Edit line was ok, most of the lines below were blacked out. Inside the actual page being browsed (here) looked identical to IE7. Due to my growing intolerance with progress.. I couldn't be @rsed to seek a solution so uninstalled it :roll: It didn't help that much of the 5 or 6 pages I was offered to set it up (Welcome to IE8 e t c) was not understood. Do you want this or that.. sounds easy but if you don't know what this or that is in the first place.. it kinda threw me from the outset. I'll probably try again in a few years time

ATB

DaveB :tab:

Dave and Ian - lots of food for thought in your posts. I tried to find a recent unbiased review of IE8 and found this site:

http://groups.google.com/group/microsof ... 2?lnk=raot

His experience with some add-ons like toolbars, Java and Flash - and printing with some HP models are interesting - read the fourth paragraph.

I think think this was written a day or so before IE8 hit WSUS which the author indicates (last message) as a sign that IE8 is fairly stable, at least in Microsoft's eyes. Ian raised a good point that eventually IE8 will be become the norm. Anyway, I think a few months wait to install is the approach I will take. I did that with SP3 and IE7 and I think I saved some headaches because of that.

Again, thanks everyone for the input.

Nigel²

Dave - sorry to hear about your experience with IE8. I've now got it installed on all four laptops at home (yeah, I know, there's only three of us - don't ask :roll: ) and no problems at all. I just said no to everything when I installed in the knowledge that I could activate it later when I found out what it was I think your black line must have been your google bar? For IE7/8 you no longer need that as there is a search box next to the address bar and you can select google as your default search engine. I don't use the menu bar (edit, tools etc) either as they can be accessed elsewhere. I know you won't be revisiting it again for a year or two, but just for your info this is what mine looks like, but there are plenty of different personalisation options:



Ian

Hello Mate

Well.. those two pale blue lines (Favourites and the one below) were mostly blacked out.. eg, a black pane sitting on top of them which restricted access (eg.. moving the mouse over the top didn't activate tooltips). Inside the browser window.. all was as it is with IE7.. fuzzy characters (I had this on the only other pc I tried it on so removed it) but otherwise normal. So.. it was the browser itself causing the issue.. not any fault of the one website I tried.. here
Incidentally.. I said no to everything too and chose Google as my search engine from the IE8 setup procedure but it still came out banjaxed :roll:

Speaking to a chap today who supposedly knows about these things.. I gather the accelarators and 'feed' also slow browsing down in IE8 and should be turned off. I'll leave that with you as I have no idea WTF he was talking about

ATB

DaveB.. IE6 x 4.. IE7 x 1.. WinXP SP3 x 2.. WinXP SP2 x3 :tab:

DaveB wrote:I gather the accelarators and 'feed' also slow browsing down in IE8 and should be turned off. I'll leave that with you as I have no idea WTF he was talking about

Well that makes two of us, Dave I've left them OFF intuitively until such times as Peter McLeland or Ben Watson suggest turning them on

Now this may interest you. With regard to this compatibility mode. It looks like Microsoft policy to make their new products backward compatible. This article suggests that Windows 7 (maybe six months away) has an XP compatibility mode which runs XP programs as though they were Win7 progs (good news for us FS9 diehards in that our sim will still be compatible with a modern OS for some time yet). It says here that, in effect, Win XP is included in Windows 7 for this purpose!

Scroll down to the second article : http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/reviews/inde ... wid=106237

Ian

Hi Ian

Tks for that amigo I've yet to venture upward into Vistaland at this moment in time but it's good to know that XP is (or will be) part of Win7 and for the same reason you mentioned

ATB

DaveB :tab:

OFFTOPIC

Straying off topic but in response to previous e-mail, I have Vista on my wife's Dell laptop. Currently considering downgrading (?) it to XP ( fortunately there are Dell drivers available for XP and Vista) mainly because I cannot get the laptop to see the XP boxes on the network. I can ping both ways and if in Vista I map a network drive on an XP box as "//192.168.0.11/e_shared" the link works but this is tedious. And searching on Google, I am not alone. Clearly Vista is just different enough from XP to baffle me and I now can't be bothered to solve it. Maybe Windows 7 will be the answer.

For someone new to all this Vista is probably fine.

Ian

As I understand it the XP virtual machine is for those programs that won't run in Win 7, whereas most XP programs will run in 7 quite happily. I haven't tried FS9 in 7, but so far everything I have tried works fine including FSX, Wings over Europe, Strike Fighters, gMax, Photoshop, iTunes, google Earth etc. etc. generally with better framerates on the same hardware. I'd be surprised if FS9 doesn't work in Win 7, the XP option is more for programs that only just ran in XP. Worth mentioning that the compatibility mode is in Win 7 Professional and higher so it may be worth finding out if you really need it before splashing out the extra, I believe the Win 7 Release Candidate is freely available from the 5th so you can start playing with it before making a purchase.
Oh and IE8, just use Firefox!

Edited to add, my Win 7 box can see drives on my XP machines without any hassles. Generally I find AV software causes more networking problems than anything else.

Cheers for that Skip

I had similar networking probs with WinME and XP (both were using the same AV at the time too.. the dreaded but not so much slagged off - at the time - Norton AV!) :o In all probability, the WinME machines were at fault due to the poor way the OS handled networks and the various protocols so as time progressed, they were all killed off and replaced with XP. Not sure if my daughter can see my network on her Vista laptop and I'd prefer it if she couldn't!

ATB

DaveB :tab:

I had similar networking probs with WinME and XP (both were using the same AV at the time too.. the dreaded but not so much slagged off - at the time - Norton AV!)

I've actually had problems networking two XP machines due to Norton! I had to disable Norton, let the two machines find each other and then turn Norton back on, otherwise there were all kinds of problems as Norton assumed it was an attack and blocked any attempt at access. Although there was an option to allow certain IP addresses I could never get it to work that way.
I don't think I ever tried networking with ME though!