Tag Archives: Internet Explorer

flash player won’t install on windows 7

Computer Aid Posted on by

This computer is running windows 7 64-bit on an i5 CPU, and had been running well for about 9 months.

At some stage, the owner got the usual prompt to upgrade adobe flash player.

She does what she always does, and upgrades.

The upgrade to 10.2 seems to complete normally

But now ie8 will not run flash files (and prompts the owner to install flash, because its not installed).

I spend a few hours trying various tricks like:

  • disable the acrobat add-on
  • install ie9
  • reset IE9 to default settings
  • remove and re-install flash
  • download the install file and install “manually”
  • download and install 2 earlier versions of flash
  • check for infections

But I do notice that flash actually works well with firefox & chrome…

So: the problem seems to be centered around Internet Explorer.

I eventually have to conceed defeat, but at least the customer is content to use firefox for now.

 

Speedup Internet Explorer

Computer Aid Posted on by

If you never use internet explorer, then you probably won’t be interested in this article.

I recently noticed that my internet explorer was getting sluggish.

I did a defrag, and that helped a bit, but not much.

I started looking at the folder “temporary internet files” (c:documents and settings{username}Local SettingsTemporary Internet Files)

Hey, there’s just over 4,000 files in this folder! (Internet options -> General ->Browsing History Settings -> view files)

I had set this folder to use only 22Mb of disk space. Of course when most of the files are less than 1Kb, theoretically, I could end up with over 20,000 files in one folder.

Since I know that accessing any NTFS folder with more than 1,000 files can make your computer seem seriously slow… I decided that this needed fixing (preferably in a non-microsoft way).

cachesentry

The answer is CacheSentry.

Although its an old program, there doesn’t seem to be anything that works better.

Once installed, you encounter its one minor flaw: you cannot tell it to autostart when windows starts… you need to manually put a shortcut to it into the startup folder.

But once started, I set the max cache size to 15Mb, and the number of days before erasing unused cookies to 180 days (6 months).

It has an option to fix a bug in the IE cache size (although I don’t know if this bug is still present in ie7 and ie8 ).

But it does do a great job at deleting “stray” files (ie files that should be deleted, but internet explorer “forgets” that they exist).

After running cache sentry, I now have about 700 files in the temporary internet files folder.

And after another defragment, Internet explorer feels nice and quick.

So now, I have CacheSentry running on all my main systems.