Wednesday, April 23, 2008

HP Pavilion dv6700t and 'Internet Explorer has stopped working'

Ever since I or rather we (a couple of my friends too) bought the HP Pavilion dv6700t for 1080 bucks with the best configuration (as on the date of purchase), we were happy about everything except Internet Explorer. Every time I closed an IE window, I got an error message that said "Internet Explorer has stopped working" and eventually as a recovery measure Vista will reopen the IE window. Initially I was led to believe that it's a compatibility problem between Vista and IE. But none of my friends who got the other brands (Dell, Sony, etc) faced this issue despite using Vista. I predominantly use Firefox for surfing (even now I'm using Firefox for adding this post) but some sites, especially Microsoft related sites (exchange servers, extranet clients) that are inevitable from the work perspective, work umpteen times better in IE than any other browser. At times, the only browser supported is IE.

After endless searches and frustrations, I landed up on the solution. It had nothing to do with Vista or IE. The problem was with the Yahoo! tool bar for IE that is installed by HP. You know what it took to address the problem?

1. Go to Control Panel - Switch to Classic View - Click on Internet options
2. Go to the Advanced tab and click the 'Reset' button at the bottom of the Advanced tab.
3. Say 'Yes' or 'OK' wherever you are asked for confirmation.

That's it. Your HP dv6700t works completely fine with IE. The only question I had was 'How did HP miss this basic thing and ship its laptop with an incompatible tool bar?!'. But getting an answer to that was not as important as fixing the issue I had! :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey thank you so much! I have looked all throughout the web looking for a solution for this problem and I FINALLY found it! Thanks again! :)

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much...for making my life easy....:-)) Hope HP finds your post and ships Firefox instead...!!