Ready to throw my MBP out the window!!!!

You won't be able to use that to install Windows. It'll only take you from XP to Vista.

 

well then financially, right now it is out of the question for me to buy a copy of windows. bummer!

 

I don't normally try and help grass roots problems on forums cause I do it everyday for a job and yeah... but anyway I'll give this a go.

Okay lets start with the problem here in question.

ActiveX is a proprietary microsoft thing. Pretty much 99% of the time you need IE to run most activex controls.

I'm not going to put activex down because honestly it has its place for a lot of things.

Now being that a mac cannot run IE you have two options.

1) Install windows in either bootcamp or a virtual machine. I personally recommend installing windows xp into a vmware virtual machine. As you are probably not a user which needs a serious bootcamp partition.

Now apparently money is tight, so I recommend grabbing a copy of windows 7 beta and installing it into a 30 day trial of vmware fusion. The process is relatively simple logically... to me a least but I realise that you might have trouble with this and so if you decide to go down this route, then I can probably write some instructions.

2) Find a method of running activex controls on mac. From a quick search it appears that Flip4Mac is the correct piece of software you need to be able to windows media content in quicktime.
So install Flip4Mac, goto quicktime and then try opening this link

http://broadcast.uwc.edu:8080/asxgen/uwc/fox/biologymajorsadvising.wmv

If that works then we can move on and think of something next.

 

I already had flip4mac installed. When I clicked on the link you posted, a blank page came up. Thanks for trying to help.

 

Don't click the link.

You need to open the link in quicktime player with flip4mac installed.

Flip4mac enables quicktime to play wmv files.

That link is a direct URL to the wmv file but clicking on it is likely to do nothing.

Ensure flip4mac is installed.
Open quicktime player and press command - U to get the open URL box. Paste the link into that and see if the movie plays.

If it plays then we can confirm that your mac is able to play wmv files and then the next step will be to see how we can load the windows media player activex control into safari/firefox.

 

actually, if i think about it, i bought an "update" vista ultimate disc from my school and it installed just fine on my macbook. take that with a grain of salt, of course. i think there are many detailed accounts of tricking the windows vista dvd to do a full install. google is your friend here

 

There's only one way that I'm aware of where you can clean install Vista using the Upgrade DVD. You have to first run the installer and leave the key blank during the install process and select the clean install option. That leaves you with an unactivated Vista (good for 30 days). You then have to use the same disk to run the Upgrade process (from within Vista) where this time you do put in your key. It essentially upgrades your unactivated Vista to an activated Vista.

 

ah yes, thats the way to do it, though i was just able to input my key after a few days when i decided to keep it, and it worked just fine... didnt have to do anything else with the dvd after the initial install.

 

You should be grateful things are so good these days

Who here remembers Windows Media Player for Mac? Anyone? Anyone?