If you've reached this page from a website link, then it's likely that you're using an out-of-date Internet Browser - probably Netscape Version 4.
It's easy to put this right.
Although the Internet dates back to the early 1970s, the World-Wide-Web (WWW) had its first beginnings in 1991, with widespread public use only from around 1995. Version 4 of the Netscape browser dates from 1996 - effectively the very early days of the WWW.
Since then there have been great advances in WWW technology, particularly the widespread adoption of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) which is a mechanism for laying out web pages and applying formatting like colour and borders. These days, you need an up-to-date browser to get the best out of many websites.
The problem is that some older browsers attempt to handle CSS but don't do it very well. The worst offender is Netscape version 4, which can mangle web pages to the point that some can be unintelligble. If you saw a warning message on one of our (or our client's ) web pages, it's because your browser didn't understand the CSS code to say it should be hidden from view!
As CSS becomes more and more important it is becoming harder and harder for web designers to produce designs which are at all acceptable in Netscape 4, and many are giving up the attempt, meaning that users with Netscape 4 will be unable to view more and more websites. Web designers are also impossibly vain, and want everyone to see their work at its best.
You need to upgrade. That's quite simple - all you have to do is to download a new one. The only problem is that the files are quite large, so you may like to download them off-peak, as it may take half-an-hour or more to complete the download.
You have a choice, and all the major browsers are free, or have free options. You can actually have more than one browser on your PC, as they won't normally interfere with each other (although they may all ask you to set them to be the "default" browser). We recommend one (or more) of the "brands" described below. Note, if you want to be convinced that they will make a difference, download one of the newest ones (e.g. Firefox) before upgrading your old version of Netscape, and compare how websites look in them - you may be surprised at what you've been mising!
At the time of writing the latest version of Netscape is version 7.2, which can coexist with Netscape 4 on the same machine. You can download version 7.2 here:
http://channels.netscape.com/ns/browsers/default.jsp
Firefox is probably the latest and most advance browser available, and is highly recommended by experts. Download the latest version (v 1.0) here:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
We recommend Internet Explorer for users who don't consider themselves experts, mainly because it's by far the most widely used. Internet Explorer (IE) is slightly different in that it is very tightly integrated with Windows (versions are available for other platforms). In addition, because IE inevitably gets a lot more attention from hackers, it's vital to have the latest version if you use IE. The best way to download IE is through "Windows Update" which will also provide security updates for other parts of Windows. We couldn't recommend this more strongly, even if you don't normally use IE as your browser. At the time of writing the latest version of IE is version 6 (Service Pack 1, with Service Pack 2 available if you are running Windows XP). Because of the many updates involved, you may find you have several hours of downloading to do - all the more reason to stay ahead of the hackers!
Opera is a well-established independent browser. The free version has a discreet panel showing unobtrusive advertisements, while the paid-for version is ad-free. We believe the Firefox browser currently has the edge, but Opera is a very acceptable substitute. The latest version at the time of writing is v 7, with v 8 in the pipline.
In each case, you'll download a large file (often 20-30 Mb). Save that to your desktop, or to a convenient folder. Always virus-scan any download, on principle! With some downloads you'll "unpack" the download into a new folder (which you don't need to keep afterwards) and run the installer program from there. In most cases, the download is the installer program. Double-click it and you'll be prompted for any necessary information - it's usually safe to accept the default options. You can often import your bookmarks (or favorites) into the new browser.
Well, it's possible. If you're running Windows 95, then the hardware and "BIOS" might not be up to it. However, we have test machines running Windows 98 (Second Edition) on hardware with 100MHz processors, 1GHz disks and with only 48Mb of memory, and they run these modern browsers comfortably, if a little slowly. If in doubt, contact us for advice (see below).
If you run into problems, you can call WalthamSoft for general advice, free of charge.
Charges (reasonable ones!) would only become applicable when we start to work together on a problem.