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The new version of the Adobe reader (version 9) is now available as i found while hunting the Adobe site to try to figure out why Adobe Reader 8 can only print 12 pages of a document at a time.

I found out the hard way though that the instructions that are on their site for downloading using Firefox are utter garbage. I followed their instructions and it used the Adobe download manager to download the file and then stupidly tried to install it automatically (which of course failed since you can’t install it from a limited account on Windows (and no one would be stupid enough to access the internet in a web browser on an administrator account unless they are trying to collect viruses). When their download mangler couldn’t install the file which it had just taken ages to download it either deleted it or hid it so well that I can’t find it. I have ended up having to download the entire program AGAIN because of their stupid download mangler. If you are going to download Reader 9 using Firefox then make sure you DO NOT allow their download mangler to run and use the regular download manager in Firefox to download the file instead.

Windows XP was shipped with two web browsers from Microsoft. Internet Explorer 6 is the one everyone knows about while almost no one even realises that MSN Explorer is there. This “hidden” web browser can be removed from your computer to free up resources and increase the security of your computer.

Removing MSN Explorer from Windows XP

here are lots of different error codes defined to cover the various possible problems hat can occur with displaying web pages in a web browser. Some of these occur fairly often (such as page not found) while there are others you will probably never see. Web sites may have a custom page defined to display when some of the more common errors occur. It is useful for everyone whether creating their own pages or just visiting other people’s pages to know what at least some of the most common error codes are so that when you see a default error page that just displays an error number you will at leas have some idea of what the error means.

Some HTTP Codes

With dozens of free FTP programs available for download you’d have to wonder why someone would want to use their web browser to do the job but it can be done. In this article I look at how you can use Internet Explorer to transfer files if you can’t spare the two minutes needed to download and install a better program for the job.

FTP with Internet Explorer

After mentioning yesterday about people buying computers with Vista and then reformatting to install XP, the relative difficulty of installing operating systems was the next thing that occurred to me.

The main reason why people run Windows rather than other operating systems is because Windows comes pre-installed on their new computer and so they do not have to go through the relatively complicated process of actually installing an operating system and getting it to work with their hardware. At least that applies to those who buy computers with XP installed,, those with Vista installed who decide to revert back to XP still have the problem of doing the Windows XP install themselves or getting someone to do it for them.

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I am continually finding forum posts where web newbies are asking how to stop people from being able to view the source of their web page. The answer of course is don’t put it on the web.

Any web page that is on the web no matter how you have encrytped in order to try to “protect” the source needs to be decrypted by the web browser in order to be able to display the web page. There are at least a dozen different ways that your visitors can access the source of your web page including the version of the source after their browser has decrypted it. It is possible to block some of these ways of accessing the source but some of them can’t be blocked.

As there is always at least one way to access the source of any web page regardless of what blocks you apply, it is pointless even trying to block people from accessing your source. Not only are you trying to lock the barn door after the horse has already escaped but the barn doesn’t have any walls.

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Over the weekend just gone I spent a rather annoying amount of time attempting to install XAMPPlite onto my Windows XP computer. The download of the self extracting file and running of that file to extract it all onto the D: drive of the computer ran without any errors. Rebooting and then opening a web browser and typing “localhost” into the address bar brought up the default web page without any problem.

That page suggested that the next thing to do was to click the “status” link so I did that. That is where I discovered the problem.

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For those of you who insist on using Internet Explorer rather than a modern web browser and who are running Windows XP, there is no longer any reason to continue to use Internet Explorer 6 with its 600+ security holes.

Internet Explorer 7 was released about a year ago but the install process insisted on your proving that you have a valid installation of Windows XP. Now not everyone who was not prepared to run that validation is using pirated software as some people have privacy convcerns about such things. Well the good news is that now you don’t have to worry about that as Microsoft have removed that step from the installation process so that everyone running Windows XP can now download and install Internet Explorer 7 without having to validate their operating system.

Internet Explorer 7 download