Microsoft | Vlad

I’ve been struggling a while tryin’ to figure out how to upgrade a beta version of IE on a computer (the 7.0 official release failed to update because it couldn’t uninstall the previous beta version). It seems that normally you need to uninstall IE from the same user account from which it was installed. This was impossible in my case and the uninstall kept failing. Luckily in the end I finally read the release notes and (who would’ve thought?) it was covered there:

Internet Explorer 7 Fails to Uninstall from Specified User Account

If you see an error message saying that you cannot uninstall Internet Explorer 7 from this user account, you can bypass the check by following these steps:

Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then press ENTER.

Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer.

Right-click the Internet Explorer key, click New, and then click DWORD value.

Type InstalledByUser as the name, and then press ENTER to finish creating the new registry value.

Try to uninstall Internet Explorer 7 again.

And it works! Gosh, what would we do without regedit…

Tags: microsoft
Posted in bitsofreality | 2 Comments »

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 Not That A Big Improvement

Written by Vlad on February 1, 2006 – 11:56 am

Everybody is talking about it – the public beta for Internet Explorer 7. Here’s my 2 cents: not that a big deal. Microsoft has failed again to put the end user in the equation. Or the developers.

The installation file is 11,2 MB, more than double Firefox is. And wait till you run it. Here’s the good news: it appears IE7 is unable to install over itself. So if you had IE7 beta 1 (MSDN subscriber) you’ll need to uninstall it before installing beta 2. Quite a pain as it involves uninstalling and rebooting. So we’re back to IE 6. But then Microsoft decides it’s time for my IE 6 to be updated and starts downloading and installing updates. Which require another reboot.

Finally, I get to start the installation of the beta 2. First it extracts the file it needs. It does that straight in c:\ and not in TEMP. And in the end I have to reboot. That’s 3rd time. Will I get anything done today?

Did I mention IE7 is unable to install over itself. I can’t wait till the final release, then I’ll be able to reboot my machine a few more times again :p

So, three reboots down the road, a lot of warnings from Microsoft Antispyware (MS, they’re both your damn products, why can’t they just get along?) and it started. First it needs to ask me some questions about fishing and stuff which it repeats just as soon as I say “No thanks!”. And then it crashes – some internal problem with frames. Arghhhhh!!!!!

Second time is luckier, it manages to start and not crash. Yet! So what’s changed? Not much from the beta 1. A bit of polishing on the GUI. Supposedly better feeds handling though i still haven’t completly understood how it handles them and why is everybody so keen about MS supporting feed parsing. Instead of relying on MS, an open source, standards based library could be put together for everyone to use.

But then again, that wouldn’t suit programmers who think all you need is a mouse and MS wizards to create great software. Anyway, so far IE7b2 doesn’t suit me, I’ll stick to Firefox for browsing. Get Firefox!

Tags: feed, microsoft, rss, sd, wordpress
Posted in bitsofreality | No Comments »