Hi all

I recently bough a new Dell Inspiron 9300 laptop. While it runs great, I’ve had some problems with Internet Explorer 6 that are incredibly annoying. What’s more, I’ve noticed the same thing happening on my friend’s new Dell laptop as well, so it must be something Dell is not including when they ship the computers.

When I surf the net, every once in a while (often enough so it becomes noticeable and annoying) I come to a page with frames that does not get properly loaded. Some of the frames just have an annoying “Page Cannot Be Displayed” error message. To see what I mean, you can have a look at these two screen shots that I recently took:

http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~ilakic/Bad%20Excite.JPG

http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~ilakic/Bad%20Site.JPG

Another symptom is that pictures don’t usually get loaded either. Instead, as you can see on the Excite screenshot, I just get an X where the picture is supposed to have been.

Further, when I click the back button, the browser does not go back to the last page. Instead, for each frame that it has been unable to load, it tells me in the status bar “Connecting to 127.0.0.1” and then dies in the process. So if there were 3 frames that were not properly loaded, I’d have to push the back button 3 times in order to get to the last page.

I can’t call Dell tech support, because they don’t deal with software issues (I’ve tried). Since this is a brand new laptop though, I’m absolutely sure there’s no spyware, adware or hijackings going on (as I said, I observed the exact same behavior on my friend’s computer).

I’d really appreciate if someone could tell me what’s going on and how to fix it. It’s driving me absolutely nuts. If you need more information, don’t be afraid to ask for it.

Thanks a lot.

Igor