IE8 & ADOBE FLASH PLAYER FIX

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Yesterday, I wanted to watch a video on Youtube when suddenly, to my surprise, I just found the following message, instead:

Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe's Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player.

Since Javascript was enabled, in order to check whether this was a problem of Youtube's site only, I browse to other sites that I know use flash tech to find that I was really unable to watch any Flash content. They all prompted me to download and install the latest version of Adobe Flash Player.

So I visited Adobe's site and tried to get the latest Flash Player online. The key thing is that after installing the add-on, the movie clip that always appear on the site saying that your installation was successful didn't appear at all. Strangely, by refreshing the page -by hitting the F5 key- it did appear. Weird.

So I said, maybe this was just a minor glitch, and opened the video page on Youtube. Unluckily, that nasty message appeared again.

This time, I opened the "Tools" menu of IE8, and selected the "Manage Add-Ons" section. There, I found that the "Shockwave Flash Object" add-on was in fact installed and the version was correct, so I tried to "reset" it by disabling the component, closing the browser, re-open it and finally enable the add-on. No luck!

One final desperate move: just in case, I just opened the following menu on my browser:

"Tools -> Internet Options -> General -> Delete"

and deleted everything. Then, I downloaded the offline installer of Adobe Flash Player from the following link:

http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/ts/documents/tn_19166/Install_Flash_Player_10_ActiveX.zip

And finally, I closed the browser and executed the installer (btw, since the offline installer does the task of uninstalling any previous version of the add-on, I skipped that part and let it do it for me).

When the process ended, I just reopened IE8, visited Youtube again to find this time that everything simply worked just fine!

I don't know if this workaround will work for you, but if you happen to experience a similar situation then just give it a try.

Well, that's it for today. I hope you find this post useful.

Stay tuned,
~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.

WIN OS REBOOT FAILS AFTER INSTALLING IE8

Yesterday I was installing the final version of Internet Explorer 8 on my Windows Vista Business machine and everything went fine until the OS prompted me to reboot.

As this is generally a usual request for new installations of IE, I just pressed the "Reboot" button with confidence.

Here was the inflexion point of my installation experience: after the machine rebooted, and the POST checks succeeded, the monitor's screen got completely blank and the main hard drive just stopped working!!! Not sound, no flashing lead, nothing.

Meaning, the OS was unable to boot; and trust me on this: turning the machine off and on after a while, didn't help at all.

If this happens to you, just don't panic. For some unknown reason -at least, for us mere mortals- the "Master Boot Record" (MBR) of your HDD may have been somehow overwritten during IE8's installation.

Maybe using the installation disks of your OS could work, by selecting the "Repair" option and then let the tool do its magic. But in my case, I used a shorter path.

I cannot assure the method I will describe will work for you; I can only state that it did work for me, therefore USE THE METHOD AT YOUR OWN RISK!

You have been warned now, so read on:

To solve this situation you don't have to reinstall your windows OS (since it's still there on the hard drive); the only thing that you have to do is find a way to write the proper MBR again to your HDD.

To accomplish this task, I searched for an old tool called Max Blast, which I used to execute when I wanted to prepare a HDD (Maxtor or Seagate) for a new Win OS installation or "sort of" repair a faulty disk. In this particular case, my main HDD was a Samsung one but I tried my luck, anyway.

I found on my archives an old Floppy Disk with version 4 of Max Blast, so I used this disk to try to reboot the system.

Then, when Max Blast executed I entered the section named "Maintenance Tools" of the main menu and then selected the option "Update MBR". After choosing the target HDD and waiting for the process to end, I finally rebooted my machine to witness that it fully worked!!!

Windows Vista was booting up again and IE8 was completely installed. Everything just got back to normal. And it only took me like 3 minutes or so to fix.

Well, this is it. I hope you find this post useful ... if you ever happen to find your-self in a situation like this :(

'till next time!
~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.

SILVERLIGHT 3 BETA 1 IS OUT (?)

There's no official word out yet but, according to the links posted on the site Next Best Geek, the first beta version of the upcoming Silverlight 3 (Runtime, SDK and Tools) has been released by MSFT.

I have yet no idea what new features are available in this beta but I cannot wait to see what's in it.

Downloading ...

~Pete

> Link to Spanish version.