Web browsers and Operating Systems

[Ben Bessett]

Came across another example of the connection of a healthy OS and it's default web browser...
In this case, the OS was Windows 7 and of course the wonderful Internet Explorer... I Installed a fresh copy of Office 2013 and attempted to activate/sign in to Office with a Microsoft account, the immediate error was that Microsoft is unable to access there servers, try again later... again and again this would come up...
On the same system, I opened internet explorer to find that there is no access to the internet there even though Chrome worked fine.. Reset IE to it's default settings and voila, Office was able to activate and we could sign in just fine... There is close relationship to a systems built in web browsers and the overall system (and applications connected to the internet)... same is true for Mac OS and Safari.
It's something that can be overlooked especially since we almost always use and recommend Chrome for many reasons, sometimes it's good to check defaults when troubleshooting

 

[GTP]

 

[glricht]

...On the same system, I opened internet explorer to find that there is no access to the internet there even though Chrome worked fine.. Reset IE to it's default settings and voila, Office was able to activate and we could sign in just fine...

Common symptom when the PC has infections inside IE or has a proxy server defined -- or both!

 

[ohio_grad_06]

I always like to get folks using a different browser such as chrome or firefox. Reason being that IE, and now Edge it appears are so tied into the OS that if something breaks in there, then you could potentially end up having to reinstall the OS. Chrome for example, who cares, blow away the profiles and start over, or install another browser, issue solved.