Ironic chat

I remember last Sunday, I was chatting with Amelia Tang, my classmate, via ICQ. It was quite ironic whenever I think about it. I hope she won't mind if she reads this.

At 10PM, Amelia sent me a message asking me to send her another Gmail invitation because the first one somehow got lost in her 100Mb Yahoo! email space. I agreed, sent it, she received it and clicked on the invitation link. Then she wrote that there's an alert on the page, stating her browser is incompatible with Gmail. I asked her few questions and realised that she's still using Windows 98, which means her browser could be Internet Explorer 5. Wow. Of course, Gmail cannot work in that old browser.

So, I tried encouraging Amelia to switch to a much better browser, obviously the Mozilla Firefox. As her connection is also dial-up, like mine, it took her about 30 minutes to download the 4.7Mb setup file. After the file was downloaded to her hard drive, she told me, when she clicked on the file, a message pops up informing that it performs an illegal operation. What? So far I know Mozilla Firefox doesn't do that. I told her to restart Windows and click on the file again. Same thing happened. I supposed her Windows system could be unstable and might be infested with spywares or viruses.

I wanted to tell her to download Spybot Search and Destroy or any antivirus software, but then, the setup might not work on her Windows system too. I couldn't ask her to upgrade to Windows XP because her old computer hardware could be incompatible. The final resort is to format everything and have a clean reinstall, or simply buy a whole new computer. That sounds like a lot of work, since the main objective here is simply to use Gmail.

Sigh, what an irony.

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Posted over 5 years ago

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