By David Gewirtz
Like a hurricane on the horizon (which, fortunately, we've managed to avoid this season), Internet Explorer 7 is getting closer and closer. In fact, if reports are to be believed, IE7 is about the make landfall in the next few days -- and it's coming to your PC whether you want it or not. In this important article, we show you how to prevent it from automatically installing.
To be fair, IE7 looks like it will be a considerable improvement over the very long-in-the-tooth IE6. Added to IE7 is a new, more modern look, tabbed browsing (finally!), better printing, RSS feeds, multiple search providers, and -- the big one -- better security.
As it's planned, IE7 will automatically download to your computer via Windows Update in the next week or so. One day, you'll start up your computer and you'll be running IE7 instead of IE6. Because IE7 is likely to be a better piece of software, that could be a good thing. But because IE7 is bound to have some compatibility problems, it could also be a bad thing.
If you want IE7, don't do a thing. It'll be there shortly.
But if you're concerned that IE7 might break some critical applications you rely on, like banking, accounting, or something specific for your company, you may want to avoid the update. Because this procedure is poorly documented and the update is on its way very shortly, we're running this Security Alert in all of the ZATZ magazines.
Now, we're not saying you'll never want to install the update. Frankly, we can't wait to start using IE7. But if you do have some key Web sites or applications you count on, we recommend contacting them first, confirming that IE7 is fully supported, and then installing IE7. By the way, if you do decide to disable the update, you can always, later, go back to Windows Update and tell it to explicitly install the new IE.
How to disable the update
If you do choose to avoid the update, you'll have to explicitly download a Microsoft tool to turn off the automatic delivery of IE7. This blocker toolkit is available from Microsoft at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=65788.
When you go to the page listed (do it in IE rather than Firefox or Microsoft will whine at you), you may need to install Microsoft's Genuine Validation plug-in. Yeah, no matter what, you're going to need to add some software.
Next, you'll be able to click the Download button and download the blocker tool. Download the tool to your desktop, but don't run it yet. Before you run it, you'll need to create a temporary folder somewhere on your computer. The easiest is to create a folder called "temp" right on C drive (this will become C:\temp). Our reason for putting it at the top level of the C drive will become apparent in a bit.
Once you've done that, double-click IE7BlockerToolkit.EXE. The program will ask you for a location to extract the files to, and then quit. We're not talking about a slick user-interface here!
Navigate to the temp folder you just created. In it, you'll find four files. The file IE70BlockerHelp.htm is an interesting read, but it's very much oriented towards enterprise IT administrators.
The file you want is IE70Blocker.cmd. And now it gets to be more fun. Because you don't want to just double-click this program. Instead, you need to run it from the command line.
To do this, select Run from your Start menu. In the Run dialog, type in "cmd", as shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
Let's open a command window. (click for larger image)
You'll see the black and white command window. For many of you, this will be new. For the old-timers among us, this nearly identical to the old DOS A> prompt we haven't had to deal with for years.
Now, at the prompt, type "cd \temp" (without the quotes), as you can see in Figure B. This will move you to the C:\temp directory, which is where the new files are located. Don't forget to hit return at the end of each command.
FIGURE B
Navigate to the C:\temp directory. (click for larger image)
You can see the files in question by typing DIR (remember DIR?), as shown in Figure C.
FIGURE C
It's old-school week here! (click for larger image)
Now comes the key step. Type in "IE70Blocker.cmd /B" and hit return. You can see the result in Figure D.
FIGURE D
You'll see the note saying the IE7 deployment has been blocked. Fun! (click for larger image)
If you later want to unblock deployment, simply type "IE70Blocker.cmd /U" in this same folder.
A happy little registry hack
All that happens when you go through this rigamarole is that a small registry entry is placed in your Windows registry, as you can see in Figure E.
FIGURE E
All that happens is a registry entry is installed. (click for larger image)
The screenshot above is from the Windows Registry Editor. While you could just go into regedit and hack in the key DoNotAllowIE70, we don't recommend it. It's so incredibly easy to screw up your registry and one mistake can completely ruin your Windows install.
Wrap-up
We're honestly really annoyed that Microsoft didn't make this do-not-install flag easier to setup. After all, some mission critical applications won't be properly updated to IE7 and restoring IE6 is likely to be a near impossibility.
In any case, good luck!