PC problems? THIS could be why...
Written: May 17 '00 (Updated May 19 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great customizability, Good performance, Great features
Cons: Can screw up your entire PC royally, Gaping security holes
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| vicwang's Full Review: Microsoft Internet Explorer Starter Kit 3.0 Full V... |
Last month our Pentium II 400 PC at work started having some SERIOUS problems. As the days went by it just went slower... and slower... and s l o w e r... until our K6 166 in the next room became a speed demon by comparison. It felt like we were running Photoshop filters, MP3 encoding, 3D rendering, and a dozen applications at ONCE, even when only one application was loaded. And while it was at least functional enough to run our financial software, even playing MP3's at the same time was enough to choke the processor to its knees.
My home PC was also having bizarre problems. The mouse cursor would FREEZE for several seconds every few minutes. Sometimes it would freeze and never un-freeze, and I'd have to reboot. Not to mention other weird little problems a couple times per day, as well as complete system crashes (including the dreaded Blue Screen of Death).
Now I'm sure you may be wondering... What the heck is this guy doing, talking about this stuff in a review of Internet Explorer?! Well, that is EXACTLY the point I am trying to make. We tried everything to fix those PC's. Virus scans with the latest updates, registry cleaners/compactors, cleaned the junk out of the Windows system directory, defragmented the hard drive, uninstalled applications... Never did it cross our minds that our WEB BROWSER, of all things, could wreak such complete havoc. And what person in their right mind would ever consider such a seemingly ridiculous explanation? Not I.
But then I received the latest issue of PC Computing magazine in the mail. While flipping through I noticed an article on preventing system crashes. One suggestion in particular caught my eye. It suggested to (and this is not a quote, since I don't have the issue with me, but I'll paraphrase):
1. Load Internet Explorer
2. Click "Tools" then select "Internet Options"
3. Under the General tab where it says "Temporary Internet Files", click "Settings".
4. Click "View Objects"
5. You will then see all the Internet Explorer "objects" that have been loaded. These are basically little programs that you have downloaded into your browser in the past. You can then delete them one at a time, or delete all of them (as I did), since none of them are necessary. Should you ever need them again, you can always re-load them.
Well as you might guess, this solved ALL of our problems INSTANTLY. And again, who could have possibly guessed? Well... perhaps I should have, to be perfectly honest, since I have been an ardent critic of Internet Explorer's "OS integration" for some time now. Browser crash? Well, that might take your whole system down with it. Try to uninstall IE? Whoops, looks like you might have hosed your entire OS. What about IE's chronic memory leaks that often force you to reboot after a few hours of web browsing? What about the HUGE security holes that quite literally open up your PC to all kinds of malicious hackers to exploit?
But still--not even I was aware of how much it could completely disrupt our entire computer's basic operation, including functions that have nothing to do with web browsing. Actually, make that "HAD nothing to do with web browsing", since apparently Microsoft has at some point decided that EVERYTHING is now wed in some kind of unholy union to their IE web browser, regardless of what logic might dictate. If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please explain to me why a defective web browser should slow my Quickbooks financial software to a crawl.
As for the quality of the browser itself, make no mistake: I love it. It's aesthetically pleasing, fully customizable, performs well, some of its "integration" features (with MS Word, for example) are actually pretty good, and (probably more of a result of its near-monopoly status than anything else) many web sites are optimized for IE. Some even require it, especially certain complex sites that incorporate ASP. And for all of IE's problems, its main competitor Netscape crashes several TIMES more often, regardless of which version I use (Netscape 6 crashes at least every five minutes!). True, Netscape might not have IE's most major flaws, but it also has a host of other problems that plant it firmly in the #2 position in the all-but-over browser wars. On the other hand, Internet Explorer 5.0 is a great product in terms of design, but Microsoft's signature, their "mark of incompetence", I guess you could say, seems to be glaring, fatal flaws that make life just that much more unpleasant.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
vicwang
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Member: Vic Wang
Location: Texas
Reviews written: 45
Trusted by: 216 members
About Me:
Systems Analyst and all-around computer guru who's always keeping up with the latest technology.
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