Hotmail/Live/Outlook.com (all the same!) goes down. A lot. It has nothing to do with your end's equipment. If one of their servers goes south, it drags. It shows up badly because it keeps EVERYTHING except your message headers and preferences on its servers. That includes your attachments, mail, mail aliases, and address book. You rely on their servers to be hot and spicy, and they ain't always so. If you complain (I have) they'll get back to you after things are fixed and report no problem found.

I personally use firefox you simply go here(link is at bottom in instructions) and hit the download button to download it to your pc,in the dialog box you can just click run from there or if you saved it to your pc go to it and double click to install, during install/setup it will ask you if you want to import your settings and favorites from IE say yes to all that way it will set it up exactly as you have your IE, it will ask if you want to set it as your default you can say no to that, that leaves IE as your main default browser, that can be changed at any time easily. Once it has installed you will open firefox it will open to the firefox website to let you know it has properly installed, it will only do this the first time, after that when you open it you will go to what ever you had as your home page on IE since it transferred that info over. It will not change anything at all on your IE. That is it, you are done, when you want to use it just click on the firefox icon on your desktop, you can use it along side IE with no problems. There are some very good add ons for firefox the one I recommend first is the ad block plus with easylist which will stop all the ads you see when visiting websites. here are the instructions with pictures Install Firefox on Windows

Sometimes that happens. Not often. Usually DNS server with bad or old info. Slow to update. . bunch of address's choices to load Hotmail www.hotmail.com www.live.com www.outlook.com might look in your recent activity for any odd things; account.live.com Here is a link that might be useful: OneDrive.Live.com This post was edited by mikie on Sun, Jul 13, 14 at 19:23

Thanks very much for the advice. We did notify the friend right away (fortunately, without (forwarding anything), just in case, but in the process of getting the software for my husband, our young friend had taken over his i-Pad--no doubt as a kindness to "the elderly," done all the necessary things for him, and in the process given someone his birth date and email address. He doesn't know if she gave them to the coffee shop so as to use its WiFi, or to the company offering the free software. Knowing that public WiFi can be dangerous, I assume that his email address had been intercepted and used in a phishing attempt or perhaps to install malware. Many years ago, I got the Hiloti virus by clicking on a PDF notice purporting to be from UPS about being unable to deliver a package--just on the day I was expecting one. Wouldn't have clicked on the PDF if it weren't for that. The minute I clicked on the Adobe PDF file that claimed to contain the details of what to do to claim my package, poof, it disappeared and my PC subsequently went haywire. I really learned my lesson, and now we are careful to check with the sender if anything is the least suspicious. I didn't know it could be dangerous for us to forward such an email, but would have phoned the friend in advance to make sure she didn't click on anything. Full scans using both Norton and Trend Micro's House Call failed to detect anything dangerous, so with that and your kind answer, I guess I can sleep tonight! Thank you for the link to the tips, too. I will read and save them.