I’m currently staying in a rather nice hostel/hotel in Edinburgh as it’s Wales vs Scotland in the six nations.
The hostel provides seven PCs for residents to use at a charge of £1 for 20 minutes use, this to me seemed a little steep for the amount of interneting that I enjoy doing, so I set about seeing if there where any ways around this monetary requirement.
As it turns out there was: upon login in the the machines you are greeted with a page asking you to top up your available internet time or view the free sites on offer. The hostel I’m staying in did not provide any free sites for you to look which is kind of sad. I got lucky and decided to press the Secured with Visa logo on the page which caused the terminal to error. This closed the Global Gossip Connect software but left me with a blank blue screen. The only keyboard shortcut I could get to work was Windows+U which brought up the Utility Management screen. From here I could use the Help option and then Right Mouse Clicking on the right hand pane gave me the option to view the source of the page. This in turn opened up Notepad and using the Open option in Notepad and changing the file type to *.* All Files gave me a simple explorer pane. I browsed to C:\Program Files\ and found a browser program in this case Firefox, right clicking the .exe file gave me the option to open. This started Firefox and allowed me to access the internet without the charges for the minutes I use.
Thanks Rob – this has been an awesome find. The problem is it seems to have stopped working recently. Any ideas what I may be doing wrong? Or any other ways you think I could get on for free – it does seem rather expensive to have to pay!
I seem to have found a partial way round this…crashed the global gossip software via the same visa logo, then hit win+l and logged out, this returned me to the ctrl alt del login screen & it seems to have locked up
Annoyingly I left it, someone else has logged in and the gg sidebar shows n/a for times, charges etc…i just cant work out how it unfroze without a reboot thereby restarting the gg software – i’ll try again sometime!
@simon
You can usually unfreeze it by hitting ctrl, alt, enter – this will then give you the usual login with a pin no. You need a valid pin no, so sadly its not totally free. Once you’ve logged in, hit logout on the gg sidebar & it will ‘crash’ showing N/A for everything & you can browse freely for as long as you like.
The only way to log out is to press and hold the power button on the machine.
Just be aware sometimes on hitting ctrl, alt, enter the screen will turn white & you will need to power cycle to reset it – I don’t know how or why this happens