Internet Explorer will not load

Hello,

Wondering if anyone can throw any light onto why it might be that my IE is not working. Last week I bought a wifi USB adapter for my laptop, which I was pleased to get working despite the fact that my laptop is now rather old (circa 2000). I am able to connect to my local wifi network and have checked the connection is working by doing a ping. However IE will not launch and neither will Messenger. I have tried a variety of different pages but I just get the classic error message.

This is the first time I have attempted to use wifi to get online with my laptop; previously I have had connections via a modem or network card. The last time I used one of the other connections (probably about a year ago now as I do not often use my laptop for the internet) IE worked fine. So it is very frustrating that now it won't!

Any ideas as to what I could try would be great. I have been through the help wizard etc but to no avail. I am running XP and my IE is IE6.

Many thanks,

Pop

 

Apologies, I fear I may have been unclear....I do in fact get the "this page has not been found" message (just the classic error message I was referring to). What I mean by IE doesn't "launch" is that I cannot connect to any web pages. In effect IE starts, attempts to connect to the page, then stops and the error message is displayed.

Sorry for any misunderstanding!