If you have recently purchased a new computer with the Windows Vista operating system you may experience problems using Internet Explorer on that system and connecting with our blackboard online learning management system here on campus. If you are experiencing problems with Windows Vista and Blackboard that is due to compatibility issue between Internet Explorer that’s installed on Vista and the blackboard operating system. Unfortunately, there is nothing technical support here can do to fix the compatibility issue between Internet Explorer and Blackboard. However, what you can do is download a different browser to connect to your Blackboard classes and then everything should work fine for you.
The browser that I recommend you download is Firefox. To download this browser on your computer you simply go to the Firefox website. If you type in www.Firefox2008.com/US and hit enter it will take you to the Firefox download page. And when you get to this page click on Get Firefox Google Toolbar, click download Firefox with Google Toolbar, click agree and install and then click save. This will open a window that will prompt you to download the program onto your computer. I'm going to download to the desktop of my computer.
You can download it anywhere but I would recommend that you just go ahead if it does it by default suggest download to the desktop. Go ahead and click the dropdown and select the desktop of your computer, click save and then wait for the program to download. Once the program downloads completely and then you can click on the run button, click on run again just continue to follow the prompts and then continue to follow the prompts to setup the Firefox browser. Click next, accept the license agreement, click next. I would suggest just to click the standard install. At this point Firefox has been installed and you can just click finish.
At this point if you have the Google Toolbar it will ask you for more options just follow the directions on the screen. I'm going to click enable page rank and enhance safe browsing and now you have a Firefox browser setup on your computer. You still have Internet Explorer. This doesn’t remove Internet Explorer or change anything about Internet Explorer. So if you like Internet Explorer and you want to use it with other things, that’s fine. But now you have an addition or browser on your computer called Firefox. You will also have on your desktop of your computer an icon created that shows Mozilla Firefox.
So in the future when you connect your Blackboard classroom, all you need to do and instead of launching Internet Explorer like you may have been used to doing is now you launch Mozilla Firefox. That will launch the Firefox browser and then you go to your Blackboard of course like normal and everything should work fine with the Firefox browser. Hopefully Blackboard and Microsoft will provide a patch or a fix for the problems between Internet Explorer and Blackboard. But at the moment this is a good alternative in order to solve any problems that you may have connected to your Blackboard classes with the Vista operating system. If you do this you run into any problems you can't get anything to work and then you can always call the help desk here on campus and I’ll be glad to help you with out with any other issues that you maybe experiencing.
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