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Getting out of Live Search hell

Live.com used to have a great map search that yielded very nice 3-d images of the landscape — much better than what you’d get with Google Maps. Worked on every browser I tried.

Alas, this now appears to be a Windows-only thing. Now if I click on 3D, I get “Virtual Earth 3D is not supported for your browser. For a list of supported browsers, see Help.” Near as I can tell from Help, Virtual Earth 3D is a Windows Thing, so I’m SOL, along with the growing number of other folks who don’t use Windows.

Anyway, this isn’t about me. It’s about my aunt. We were at her house in Maine over the weekend. She has a Windows PC. When we tried getting a 3D map going at Live.com on her machine, we were led to a very long install process that ended with a message saying it wouldn’t work without something having to do with hardware accelleration. So we gave up.

But afterwards her PC ran slower, and now insists on trying to run Live Search, no matter what, when she runs Internet Explorer. My aunt would like help in making it go away. I’m not there, but I figure there are some Windows experts among ya’ll who can post suggestions in the comments below. Thanks.

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6 responses to “Getting out of Live Search hell”

  1. Andria Krewson Avatar
    Andria Krewson

    Go to:
    https://support.live.com/eform.aspx?productKey=wllocal&ct=eformts
    On the right under frequently asked questions, click on “How do I turn on 3D hardware acceleration.”
    That might not have the right answers, or require a new driver or bigger video card or some other nasty thing.
    She could just stop using Explorer and switch to Firefox.

    Reply
  2. Matt V Avatar
    Matt V

    I installed it in Firefox & immediately saw in the task manager that memory usage by firefox shot up to 300MB, which is WAY more than usual and would be a big problem on PCs with 1GB of RAM or less.

    I think you need to uninstall it.

    Go to add/remove programs in the control panel. Scroll down to “virtual Earth 3D Beta” and uninstall it. That should solve the slowdown issue.

    There were some check boxes at the end of the install process to make live search the default. Someone with more IE experience than me is going to have to help you make the default Google again.

    Reply
  3. Mike Taht Avatar
    Mike Taht

    Recently someone I know wanted to get off of hotmail/windows live.

    Up until recently you could setup hotmail to forward your hotmail email to any other service. Not anymore. Now you can only forward your email to a private domain, exclusive of services like gmail, etc.

    What’s next? A windows only web? And would anyone notice?

    Reply
  4. Prolific Programmer Avatar
    Prolific Programmer

    Use the User-Agent switcher extension to say IE for this site.

    Reply
  5. contentious.com – links for 2007-10-23

    […] Doc Searls Weblog · Getting out of Live Search hell “Live.com used to have a great map search that yielded very nice 3-d images of the landscape — much better than what you’d get with Google Maps. Worked on every browser I tried. Alas, this now appears to be a Windows-only thing.”” (tags: search tools geography maps problems) […]

    Reply
  6. Anonymous Avatar
    Anonymous

    Assuming IE7, click on the down-arrow that’s to the right of the magnifying glass that’s to the right of the search box in the upper right-hand corner. From the menu that appears, choose “Find More Providers…” That will take you/her here:

    http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/en-en/default.mspx

    Select the search engine you want from the list on the left. An “Add Search Provider” text box will appear. Check the checkbox named “Make this my default search provider” and then click the “Add Provider” button.

    At this point, if you want to remove Live Search, despite it not being the default, click on the down-arrow again and choose “Change Search Defaults…” Highlight “Live Search” and click the “Remove” button.

    Reply

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