Landships II

Mark,

That is a very good question.  The answer is that "it depends". 

Microsoft has the "does not play well with others" reputation so there are a few things that could be the problem.

The easiest thing that could do this is the fact that their search engine is slow.  If the search page (see the link above) initially comes up fine (every thing is visible, no errors or redirects) then the problem could be the slowness of the search engine.  I've had it take from 2-3 second all of the way to over 30 seconds to complete a search (it could have been taking longer but I stopped it and went back to rephrase my search terms).  The more "hits" that are returned from a search, the slower it is putting up its results page.  Try doing a very specific search like "rolls royce armoured car" (with or without the quotes) rather than "car" and see if things improve.  As you get a grasp on the time various searches take you can move back towards more general search terms with confidence that Live Search will eventually give you the results in a minute or so.

On the other hand you may have the technical problem that I had.  I have known that Live Search Books was out there for a number of months now but I could rarely get it to come up without a blank page coming up or a dead link warning error from my internet provider (Earthlink).  It turns out that this is a problem with the internet provider's software not getting along with Microsoft's software. 

The answer is to change the IPs on your computer.  On a PC running Windows XP this can be easily done by going to your start menu, clicking on the "control panel" button, then click on "network connections", then click on "local area connection", click on "properties", highlight "internet protocol" and click on "properties", click on "Use the following DNS server addresses", and then use these numbers:  4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2  Hit the "OK" button and then close all of the Windows and restart your computer.  When it comes up simply go to the Live Search website and start using it.  (I'm not able to check but there is a possibility that this may make Google Books available to some of the folks who could not access that before either - try their website and see.)

Just in case you might ever want to go back to your pre-existing setup, you can write down the DNS server numbers that are already there before you replace them with these new numbers.  - If there are no numbers already there then your computer is set to obtain the numbers automatically.  In that case to return to your previous setup you just click the "Obtain DNS server address automatically" in you internet protocol.  Restart your computer and you are back to your previous settings.

The setup with these new numbers works fine for me.  I recommend printing out this email before you change the numbers because if you do it wrong you could loose access to the net until you correct it and you might find the instructions helpful.  I also recommend being careful and keeping track of what you are doing for for the same reason.  If your system differs from what I've described you should look around online for instructions that are specific to your machine.  - Remember to restart your machine every time you alter these settings to get them to take effect!

Mark