For some reason, Hotmail, and all other ways of accessing Hotmail, do not work on my recently purchased laptop running Vista and IE7. All other pages work normally. I can’t figure it out, MS help is no help (so what else is new?) and it’s really cramping my style.
Could you explain a bit more? You can’t access www.hotmail.com? Have you tried www.live.com (should redirect)? Or outlook express? Or what?
Sorry. I’m referring to accessing the hotmail.com site. live.com doesn’t work for that purpose either, nor does mail.live.com, nor the link on www.sympatico.ca .
FWIW, it’s working okay for me with both Firefox and IE7, checked both just now.
What does it do when you try, load a blank page? Or give you a 404? Access denied?
It might be firewall settings blocking particular pages. Or perhaps your ISP blocked it for some bizarre reason. But I can’t think of why else IE7 would block a particular page. It certainly isn’t a default setting for IE7 or the Windows Firewall however so might be your HW manufacturer put that in the build for some weirdo reason.
It gives a “this page cannot be loaded” error, as if the computer isn’t connected to the Internet. It can’t be the ISP, because I’ve tried it in numerous different places using WiFi, via both secured and non-secured connections. And (thanks, DDG) I know it isn’t a Hotmail problem, because it’s been this way ever since I bought the computer, and I’ve accessed Hotmail numerous times on other machines since then.
I know this is kind of a bog-standard “No idea” type response, but have you checked the hosts file to see if something (malware) has specifically rerouted Hotmail?
How would I do these things?
Well, for my suggestion (and it is a long shot) then you would proceed as follows:
Open Windows (not Internet) Explorer or otherwise navigate to
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc
and open the file called “hosts”, without quotes.
Edit to add: I just opened this file on my Vista machine and it asked me what program to use. Either Notepad or Wordpad would be fine.
Look at the entries and do not mess with this file if you are not sure. What you are looking for is something like -
127.0.0.1 www.hotmail.com
That would be trying to find hotmail via an imaginary DNS server on your own computer. It has been done by malware programs, but I repeat that it is a long shot. If you can’t find anything, close the file without saving it. If you find something that seems suspicious, I’d suggest posting it here before you do anything else.
Dammit, it’s too late in the day 
I meant to copy and paste anything that seems suspicious and let folks here have a look, but again, please take care not to alter the file itself.
Well, for malware, go to www.microsoft.com and download the malicious software removal tool, although if you’ve got antivirus running that should prevent most malware anymore.
Another thing to check - have you downloaded any software recently? Firefox or anything like that?
Finally, open Windows Firewall (if it’s turned on) via the control panel and check and see if www.hotmail.com is being blocked. That should be a configuration setting but I don’t recall where it is. You might have another personal firewall product if you have an Antivirus suite installed like Norton or something.
Let us know…
I don’t know the answer, but it’s probably just Vista being Vista. I asked about the same thing (different site) back here, and none of the answers worked for me.
Basically, Vista intermittently can’t see some sites that every other computer on the network can (including the same computer when booted to either of two other Operating systems). It basically acts like DNS isn’t returning any results, but I can drop to terminal and ping the same address with no problem.
Rebuilding the network connection (“diagnose”, “repair” on the network setting in control panel) sometimes fixes it, so does rebooting (which does the same thing more slowly). Sometimes not. The problem will go away after a while. FireFox doesn’t have the problem as often, but once you’ve triggered it in IE, FireFox won’t be able to see the site, either.
It decreased in frequency a couple months ago with a Windows update, but hasn’t gone away entirely. At this point, I’m pretty sure it’s just a Vista bug with caching of DNS information to high-level services. I do this sort of stuff for a living and can’t make it work, so I don’t think it’s a simple “you’re doing something wrong” issue.
What happens if you open a command window and type
telnet www.hotmail.com 80
If it clears the screen or otherwise appears to connect, then type
GET /
(You will most likely not be able to see what you are typing, but type it anyway. Then press enter 2x.)
Clearing the cache helps sometimes in these situations