Often a page in known to be working and yet someone complains that they can not get the same page in it’s entirety that others have recently visited.  In some of these cases the problem is the browser settings or installed features that are causing the problems.

A common problem that can occur on any website is that a cached portion of a corrupted webpage is stored and needs removed from the browsers cache.   Clearing the cache is the first step in troubleshooting web browser problems.

When you visit a web page with your web browser it caches the layout and graphics of the pages to files on your hard drive. When you open these pages again within a short period of time it will show you the cached version if the content of the page hasn't changed. This is done to speed up the page rendering process since loading images from a hard drive is potentially faster than loading them from internet. Sometimes, that cache gets corrupt or the web browser fails to recognize new changes on the remote web page. In such situations you may be looking at an outdated cached version of the page or you may see garbled images or text or the elements of the web page may be missing altogether. You will need to clear the cache to force the browser to reload the pages.

Video for clearing the cache in Internet Explorer 7:

Are all the features that the page requires installed?

Flash & Java

http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

http://www.java.com/

Trusting a specific site and enabling more browser functionality via a Trusted zone.

The Trusted sites zone is a security zone for sites that you think are safe to visit. You believe that the site is designed with security in mind and that it can be trusted not to contain malicious content. To add or remove sites from this zone, you can click the Sites… button. This will open a secondary window listing the sites that you trust and permitting you to add or remove them. You may also require that only verified sites (HTTPS) can be included in this zone. This gives you greater assurance that the site you are visiting is the site that it claims to be.

For a more fine-grained control over what features are allowed in the Trusted zone, click the Custom Level button. Here you can control the specific security options that apply to the Trusted zone.   Be sure that the Trusted Sites is highlighted and you are enabling features only to the Trusted Sites zone (picture below).

For example ActiveX can be Enabled by selecting Enable for Run ActiveX controls and plug-ins (picture below).

The XBOX Media Center is now codenamed Atlantis and is NOT just for XBOX anymore.  It now runs on Mac, Linux and Windows!  So you don't know what XBMC is?   Well it has been the best home movie player for years!  It started as a project on sourceforge.net for the original XBOX to play movies and music and has been one of the most popular projects on sourceforge.  Best of all it plays every file format you would ever want it to.  It plays all them torrent/Usenet type movies.  It also plays right from a .ISO file without the file needing to be burned.  It will even go into a .rar and play it without extracting.  Need I say more?   Okay how about it is already compiled and has a installer too.  Skip to the download already.

I did not know that XBMC had a windows version so me and the fiancé sat down to watch the Blue Ray version of Batman Dark Night.  I had downloaded the 16 gig .mvk file and had my somewhat trusty VLC Player on my PC ready to go.  I know what your saying, shame on us we downloaded a video.  Well, bite me, we saw this one in the theater and I don't own a Blue Ray DVD player hence why we are using my PC.  But I do own a 30 inch Samsung monitor that is hooked up to my PC. I also don't own any high def televisions and we wanted to see this movie again in high def.  Hence the 30 inch PC monitor.    We watched a good portion of this movie only to find that about every two minutes or so the video skips and continues.  Arghh!  What the heck can it be?  this is my first Blue Ray movie but come on.  I have a quad processor and two gigs of memory and a 300 gig sata drive running 64 bit vista.  So I go to the command line and run perfmon and look for bottle necks but I don't see any.  I figure it has to be caching but I don't have any options in the VLC Player to do caching.  I also run "fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2" with no success.  The video still skips on my PC.  My fiancé  is less than entertained and we "can movie night" and go watch advertisements on TV (crappy night).

Next day I have given up on the whole Blue Ray thing and started thinking about the kid's movie that needs to be push out to the XBOX.   Yeah, I need some programming time today and the kid watches his movies off the original XBOX, not the PC with the 30 inch Samsung.  Sorry, but I need some programming time today kid.  That got me thinking and Googling, what about that lovely XBMC program that the kid uses on his XBOX?  OH-Yeah they have done it!  XBMC for windows my problems are solved.  I know that XBMC will not have any issues skipping but I did have one small problem that is easily fixed.  The windows download (here by the way) would not work on my less than wonderful VISTA 64 bit computer.  This is somewhat understandable because I can not get a lot of things to work on 64 bit Vista.  I know the real problem is the 64 bit part.  This is likely just because Microsoft sucks and has no style. It is totally understandable, that XBMC's alpha software does not yet run on a crappy 64 bit version of Vista  yet.  Getting anything to run on 64 bit has been a ongoing pain.  Why is that?  64 bit processors are pretty common place now a days.

To overcome XBMC not running on 64 Bit Vista I simply download what the XBMC team is calling XBMC Live and burned it to CD.  The CD is bootable and therefore it does not run the Vista OS at all.  The bootable XBMC version appears to use it's own tiny Linux OS and it DOES NOT INSTALL anything onto my PC if that is what I wish.  XBMC Live simply runs off the CD! Thank god for that!  We now don't need to rely on Microsoft to NOT break anything for XBMC to work!  Please XBMC team let's remove the "Live" from the name it sounds like you guys are going to charge us a monthly fee like Bill Gates.  They don't charge anything by the way, XBMC is Free and Open Source not Microsoft.

After booting XBMC I configured it to find the movie on my server with a SMB share or Samba share for you Linux people.  What is a SMB share?  Well a Samba is what the rest of the world calls a windows shared folder.  This part was really easy for me because this is what I'm use to doing.  I have a server in my basement that runs 24/7 that I call it Black-Server.  So Black-Server is wired via a firewall router to two XBOXes and one computer.  Black-Server also happens to be the server that is delivering you this web page right now.  I sometime sing Cream's Song "White Room" but replace the lyrics with "In Black-Server with white hard-drive's.. In the Basement".  But my sanity is another blog altogether, black server has a file share on it.  The point being is that the computer with the big 30 inch monitor has a gigabit connection to the server in the basement where the movie was stored.  The movie is 16 gigs and I don't have any media upstairs that has room for it.  Black-Server has plenty of media in it's white hard drives where I keep all the movies, in the basement. (okay I'll work on the song later.)

So now a quick diagram in case you got lost :

Don't let Samba file sharing scare you into thinking this is a large project, you might not even need Samba or Networking to play your movies. I would also dare say that your not as nutty me.  First off your computer will likely run XBMC's install because it's NOT the 64 BIT version of Vista and 2ndly you will not be doing file shares all over the house to two XBOX consoles and one PC.  If you are like me and already have two computers on the same network the hard work of networking is done.  Your basically just entering in a \\computer_name\folder_share_name\ and User IDs and Passwords into the dialog boxes in the XBMC application.  The XBMC application is not like the older version of XBMC either where you needed to put this information into a xml file however this is still an option.   We now have dialog boxes and your PC's keyboard at your disposal.  So go for it easy stuff but if your need to read about the Samba Stuff try here.  Expert PC (likely you) can really skip the manual just try the XBMC install here.