I’ve noticed something odd. It’s not a huge bug and might not interest a lot of Mutants, but I’m trying to troubleshoot it and could use a pointer or two on the issue.
Just a couple of days ago, I could play around to my heart’s content on both the main BoingBoing site and the BBS on my grumpy old Toshiba laptop. (It’s a Qosmio X505, probably 6-7 years old.) I’m running Win 7 and typically browse in IE10, mainly out of habit. (I know, bad me.)
Today I can load the main BoingBoing page and topic pages, but try as I might, the BBS refuses to load. All I get is a blank page. I’ve tried accessing it through the main BBS page and through Comments links, but it never loads. I tried going through the Internet Tools/Privacy menu and adding the BBS into the Trusted Sites group-- same thing, blank page.
However, the BBS is loading perfectly in Firefox, Chrome and Opera, so I’m thinking this is more of an IE bug than a site bug. That’s as far as my very rusty troubleshooting skills have gotten me. If anyone knows what I could look at next, I’d appreciate it. I’m curious to see if I can figure out the problem.
(And yes,I know, if I’m going to keep using IE I really should update it. I will, eventually. I don’t have a calm enough brain to wrestle with the upgrade process today, especially as I’d need to do it without allowing Windows Upgrade to stick Win10 on my machine.)
Closest thing I have is a W7 with IE11 and it’s a work computer I don’t BBS on.
Usual troubleshooting steps are clear cache and check for config issues. If Chrome works on the same machine, it’s not proxy or hosts file. Probably. Edge cases surely exist.
I’ve run OSes well past their expiry so I won’t give you a hard time. If clearing cache, etc. doesn’t make it load, it may be time to move on to a newer browser at least.
In Opera on Android, for the last few days I’m getting random bits of the page not showing; black boxes here and there that disappear after a bit of scrolling or a tap inside them (any hidden buttons or links work straight away).
I’m fairly satisfied with Win7. And when I’m good with an OS, I tend to stick with it as long as possible. I have heard that 10 is a much improved version of 8, but given I’m using an older laptop I don’t really see why I need an OS that’s designed more for touchscreens and newer devices. On the other hand, I suppose I should consider upgrading as it might fix a few issues I’m having, like the laptop not waking up from Hibernate properly.
The start menu is a wee bit different but you can still hit the start key and type in the name of the program you want so it still does what I want it to do and pinning common used stuff is way better. I am on an older machine too and I have been really happy with the OS over win7. Definitely boots up quicker even when you do a full shutdown.
And hey it is free for a little bit longer.
Depending on the symptom, it may be possible to fix your hibernation with a little bit of work that’s not too hard to accomplish. Although if you’re using nearly all of your available space, I wouldn’t recommend it. (Assuming no hardware issues, corruption of the hibernation file is the most common cause I’ve seen.)
But I’ll also throw in a recommendation for Windows 10. It works pretty well even on older hardware. Microsoft seems to have decided to converge their consumer OSes to a degree so the OS is meant to run on marginal ARM processors with limited RAM in addition to recent x86 hardware with spades of RAM.
Hmm, you should be able to upgrade to IE11 easily first – I recommend trying that as the path of least resistance. I will check on my end later tonight.
I can confirm that meta.discourse.org works just fine in IE11 (so does BBS but I don’t want to log in on that browser right now, whereas I did fully log in on meta), so I suggest upgrading to that. It should really be no big deal to upgrade to IE11 which is fully supported… IE10 is quite old by now.
On January 12, 2016, support ended for IE10 on Windows operating systems capable of running Internet Explorer 11, due to new support policies dictating that only the newest version of IE available for a supported version of Windows will be supported. IE10 will only be supported on Windows Server 2012 and Windows Embedded 8 Standard.
I’m sure it’s either the browser or a glitch in the system somewhere. It’s crashed a few times lately (due to the Hibernate issue.) I do appreciate all the troubleshooting suggestions, I’m way out of practice. I’ll probably tinker with things after I get off work tonight and see what happens.
