I received an email from subscriber Bev, who wrote that she was having problems running some online games:
Hi, Love your newsletter and look forward to it.I don\’t know how to explain myself very well so you can shorten my description immensely. I have an HP Vista Home Premium 3 months old. 2 gig ram. I play games on Pogo.com every day.
I have an HP Laptop XP Pro 2 years old. I have a Linksys router G 4 port 802.11G I use Cox Cable IP. I have been having a big aggravating problem with my game page just dropping out losing my progress.
I play Mahjong Garden and many others. It leaves a page saying Unable to connect to server.
It lists a couple reasons saying the applet was unable to open this connection and this could be caused by being located behind a firewall or proxy server. It also says if you know how to use tracer route to find where problem in network is.
Well I am novice so don\’t know nothing about that. This happens periodically on desktop but mostly laptop. Does my router use a firewall? I even shut firewall off on laptop but that didn\’t help. Any suggestions.
If you can\’t help I understand but am trying options. Thank you and keep helping us.
Bev
Bev,
A router does act like a firewall in that it blocks connection attempts from the outside. This is a good thing.
Many Pogo games use Java (from Sun Microsystems) as their working environment. Java is free and you apparently already have it installed since you’ve played games there before.
I think your problem is an old version of Java. You can check your version to see if it’s current — go to www.java.com. If you need an updated version, you can get it there for free.
Click on the link near the center that says “Do I have Java?” The next page will tell you whether you have the latest version or not and let you update to the latest. It will also tell you which version you have. The latest is version 6 update 3.
Tech Tip
To me, it said “Oops! You don’t have the recommended Java installed. Your Java version is Version 6 Update 1.” Time for me to update, too…
Just below that, there’s a Download Now button and an indication that the download version is Verision 6 Update 3.
Once you click the Download Now button, you’ll get two choices for your computer — an “Online” and an “Offline” version. Offline means that you will download the file and then run the installation after you finish downloading.
I prefer to download the file so that I have it. I also don’t want to update while downloading, for fear of something (anything) interrupting an update in progress.
and