Okay this is pretty weird.

On December 11, I was using Internet Explorer and it was working quite fine, but later that night my mother tried to use Internet Explorer and it kept hanging (i.e. it wouldn't respond and the little blue circle would keep spinning) when she tried to log-in to her e-mail account or when she tried to use facebook. I tried using those same websites on my sister's laptop and they worked fine on that computer. I also tried using Google Chrome to access the e-mail accounts and facebook that night and the sites worked fine on Chrome. I figured that the problem was with Internet Explorer and hoped that it was some glitch on Internet Explorer's side that they would take care of, rather than being something wrong with my individual computer or browser that I would need to take care of.

The next day my mother and I tried the same sites on the computer but it still didn't work. I had a final exam in that morning so I had to let the computer wait for a while when I went to take my exam. Later on my mom and I were still trying to fix the computer, and I noticed a little icon on the bottom right corner of the computer that mentioned that it was downloading updates, I hoped that the update download was slowing down the computer and causing Internet Explorer to hang and that once the downloads finished everything would work fine. However, when the computer finished downloading and installing all the updates, Internet Explorer still kept hanging.

I told my mother that until I could figure out how to get Internet Explorer to work we would just have to use Chrome, so that is what we did (I also used Safari). Meanwhile I tried using Google to figure out how to get Internet Explorer to work and would occassionally try Internet Explorer. One thing I noticed about Internet Explorer that I hadn't noticed before was that there was this blue "no sign" (the circle with the little diagonal line through it) that was showing up on the url bar, when I would click on the sign it would say something about ActiveX filtering. So I tried changing the ActiveX filtering options on Internet Explorer's "internet options" tab, turning filtering on, turning it off, but it didn't seem to make any difference. I tried using a Microsoft Fix-it program for Internet Explorer that I downloaded from Microsoft and found via a Google search. The program appeared to do no good in getting it to work, but it did reset Internet Explorer to default settings. I had considered uninstalling Internet Explorer and then downloading Internet Explorer and re-installing it, but I never got around to it.

After a while I got used to Chrome and would just use Chrome when I wanted to use the internet, occasionally checking Internet Explorer to see if it was working. Then one day a few weeks ago I was fooling around a bit with the control panel and stumbled across the "Accounts" menu, I noticed the guest account option and turned that on. Then I switched users and logged into the guest account, while I was on the guest account I saw the Internet Explorer icon on the "DellDock" at the top of the computer and decided to click it and see what happened. I logged into my e-mail account using Internet Explorer and everything worked. I then logged off of the guest account, enter the other account, went on Internet Explorer and logged into my e-mail account and everything worked! I then told my mother about this, went back into the control panel and turned off the guest account option.

So now Internet Explorer works and I use it sometimes (I'm writing this blog on it), for example I have used Gamespot on Chrome in the past few weeks because sometimes in the past few weeks Gamespot wouldn't respond when I click something using Chrome. But I've actually gotten used to Chrome. I think my mother still mostly uses Chrome now.