Anyone have any idea why my laptop won't show higher characters on this bbs, but has no problem with them on google and other sites?

What's your default encoding set to? These BBS pages don't appear to contain an encoding tag (despite most people treating them as 8859-1) and so your browser's default will be used. Google and other pages will probably specifically set an encoding.

Locale-specific encodings are rubbish, anyway. Unicode Is The One True Encoding, And UTF-8 Is His Prophet.

Hmm, I wonder if I can set my default encoding to UTF-8, then stick loads of UTF-8 in my posts and have it work? That would be well cool.

Peter