For several months I have been experiencing connection problems with my pre-paid 3G broadband connection. Frequently a message appears informing that I need to recharge even though I have not exhausted my credit, although the message does eventually go away. More problematic though is that the bars in the connection manager vary and sometimes I am informed that it is “roaming” (whatever that means) even though the computer is in the same location every day. I assume this is why in Outlook I frequently receive messages saying that the connection to the server has failed: “Server: smtp.gmail.com. Protocol: SMTP. Port: 465. Socket error: 10060. Error: 0×800CCC0E” and “Server: pop.gmail.com. Protocol: POP3. Port: 995. Socket error: 10060. Error: 0×800CCC0E”. This will generally right itself, but can take anywhere from a few minutes to (more often) several hours. The other interesting aspect is that while I cannot access email or the internet, the bytes count still goes up in the “Sent” and “Received” columns in the internet connection status box. This is a maddening problem because I now only have intermittent and unpredictable access to email and the internet. Can you help please? (more…)

A problem has occurred with the installation of Mozilla Firefox on my computer and I need to reinstall the software. Is it possible to save my current bookmarks so that they can be brought back into the new version of Firefox? The computer is running Windows XP. (more…)

Recently I purchased a new laptop running Windows 7 64-bit. However, many of the websites which I visit use Flash so I need to use the 32-bit version. I am suspicious that something may be wrong with the installation of Flash on my computer as when I use Internet Explorer I can no longer open any new programs as all the computer memory is consumed – I need to keep the Task Manager open and kill the IE 32 before other things will work. I am loathed to uninstall and reinstall Flash since the plug-in seems to automatically upgrade itself. Any ideas are welcome. (more…)

When closing Internet Explorer a message appears asking whether I would like to close all tabs or just the current tab. If I click the “All Tabs” option the timer goes round and around forever and nothing is closed. If I click the “This Tab” button it usually closes but then the timer appears and the same thing happens. The only way to stop the timer is by going to the “Start” menu > “Turn off computer”. A message appears to say that Internet Explorer is not responding and asks whether I would like to end the process. This force closes Internet Explorer and turns off the computer, allowing me to restart and Internet Explorer works until the next time. The computer is running Windows XP with auto-updates enabled. (more…)

Recently I purchased a computer running Windows 7 64-bit and when using Internet Explorer 9 it intermittently freezes and does not allow me to go back, change tabs, or close tabs. The only way I can get rid of the non-responsive tabs is to restart the entire computer. Internet Explorer doesn’t display any messages when the problem occurs. Additionally, on occasion an error message appears saying “Security Error: Error #2000: No active security context”. However, the occurrence of this error does not correlate to the times that Internet Explorer freezes so I am unsure whether it’s related. (more…)