4 responses to “Details on the Win7 European browser ballot box”

1. 

   Tim December 19th, 2009 at 12:22

   Actually, that sounds kinda good. I wouldn’t have minded Microsoft offering the US those options.

   But, then again I’m not a computer whiz and I like my PC to be as user friendly and one-button click as possible.

   Perhaps I should have bought a Mac?

   Btw, Woody, I haven’t purchased your Dummies for Win 7 yet, so I had to figure out on my own how to stop certain programs from starting on start-up. It’s not as easy as Vista, at least not the way I did it using the system config. program. It was harder for me to find through the help menu on Win 7.

2. 

   Greg December 20th, 2009 at 02:58

   Excuse me if I missed this somewhere else but does this decision in Europe mean that those machines will not have Internet Explorer installed AT ALL or is IE still an integral part of the OS?

3. 

   woody December 20th, 2009 at 21:10

   That’s a very perceptive question. The short answer is that you get to the ballot box via IE. Microsoft claims, rightfully, that it has to have some sort of interface to get the ballot box to appear. IE is the only game in their arsenal.

   IE is NOT an integral part of Windows 7. You can not only disable the interface (as you could with Vista), you can yank it out by the heart and stomp on it.

   That said, I don’t recommend that you disable IE – keep it updated, but don’t use it.

4. 

   woody December 20th, 2009 at 21:13

   Tim -

   Disabling autostarting programs in Vista was easy, with Windows Defender. But it’s even easier with Autoruns. I wrote about Autoruns in the April 23 issue of Windows Secrets Newsletter. If you’re a subscriber, you can see the whole article at http://windowssecrets.com/2009/04/23/06-Knock-out-problematic-autostart-programs .