Unfortunately, many applications and websites are designed using IE7 as their standard. The consequence is that sometimes I can do things I can do in IE7 that I can't do in Firefox. Although Firefox tries hard to keep up, sometimes it needs a little help.
When I tried to view videos on Firefox tonite, they wouldn't play. I'm talking about the YouTube videos that I loaded into a blog article which I wrote last night (very early this morning); they played just fine 20 hours ago, but now they will load, but not play.
As a test, I opened the same article and attempted to view the same videos using IE7. Yep, they loaded and ran as they should. Obviously, the problem was not with the blog article or the YouTube videos, but with my own Firefox browser settings.
Using the Microsoft Control Panel (I'm running MS XP Home operating system), the only update I found was a minor update in Firefox, which was auto-loaded this evening when I started my browser.
Looking at the PROGRAM FILES, I see that one small file was loaded at 7pm tonight.
I have experienced this problem before, and that time (two weeks ago) I found updates in my Flash Player up to version 114. I had researched the problem and de-installed versions back to version 46. That was clearly not the problem tonight.
On a hunch, I used a piece of 'fix' software called RegCure, which was created to detect and fix registry problems. My thinking was that the relatively minor problem with Firefox might be due to incompatibility in Registry updates which have accumulated over the past two weeks.
When I ran RegCure, it found 293 problems in the Registry. (Click on image to view.) I allowed it to fix the problems, which took less than a minute.
Then I re-opened the Firefox browser and attempted to view the same videos; nothing happened. The problem still existed.
I needed to restart my computer for the Registry changes to be loaded.
After restarting the computer, I was able to view the videos just as I had last night.
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I suppose you could consider this a testimonial for RegCure. I certainly wouldn't have been able to find and fix the problems unaided, but I'm just barely Geekish enough that I realize there are tools available to do the things I couldn't do unaided. (This is, in part, the reason why automobile repair shops have exotic electronic machinery in every repair bay, to fix the things that Mechanics cannot do unaided without extensive training.)
RegCure may not be the right solution for everyone, and in fact there is some question whether the most of the available Registry Cleaner software packages are actually as good as they say there are.
I did some more research, and found this comparison of the available software, from Pro Soft Labs.
I don't know if the review was entirely unbiased, butRegCure did have the highest rating among those tested. And what I do know is, it worked for me.
It was worth the $29.95 price of purchase, if it only served to prevent me from tearing out what few hairs I have left on my head.
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