I find myself working remotely on various issues all the time. Often, it is quite late and there is no line of communication with the affected user (and sometimes the technician that escalated the issue). That was the case recently. I needed to obtain an unpublished secure URL to a login portal to recreate and correct a problem. This information should have been included in the incident but was not. In our IT environment, we enforce “Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed” through group policy; additionally, earlier troubleshooting had resulted in the IE History and Cookies being deleted. As a result, I would not be able to go through any of the files stored in the temporary Internet folder to find the URL I was looking for.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Read the rest of this entry »

I have run into quite a few IE environments in my time, often cluttered with annoying toolbars. Although I frown upon too many toolbars in any browser, I decided to see how many toolbars I could install in IE before I got tired. To isolate this potentially unstable environment, I started Windows XP mode from my Windows 7 system and after 45 minutes achieved the following:

Now begins the process of removing the toolbars.

This is available only in IE 8 (and eventually IE 9). If IE is taking too long to start up, one of the things you can do to troubleshoot this is to go into Manage Add-ons from Tools > Internet Options > Programs and check the Load time column for the various toolbars and extensions:

UPDATE

Since writing this, IE9 Beta has been released and it will automatically inform you when an add-on takes too long to load. This is known as the Add-on Performance Advisor. The threshold has been set to 0.2 seconds. Anything taking longer and you will be advised by IE. Read here for further details.

Google offers a browser add-on that prevents them from collecting data on the web sites you visit. However, you can do this in IE natively, without the need of Google’s add-on.

1. In Internet Explorer, open the Tools menu and click Internet Options.
2. Click the Security tab and then click the Restricted Sites icon.
3. Click the Sites button.
4. In the box at the top, add *.google-analytics.com and push the Add button.
5. Click the Close button, and then the OK button to dismiss Internet Options.
   

See the TechNet IEBlog here for details.