An important choice to make: your browser, New update from Microsoft KB976002 is not very user friendly

Today a new Windows Update has been installed (KB976002)  which after booting up your PC will show a screen with the title..

"An important choice to make: your browser".
The window has a title of "Information Regarding Web Browsers".

It has an OK button to click on, if you click that then it shows the screen I have pasted in here, it also shows this if you click on the close button.
It shows a random selection of 9 choices of browsers.
Below each one are two buttons labelled "Install" and "Tell me more".
Apparently this update is something to do with Microsoft having to make people aware that they do have a choice as regards which web browser they wish to use, so the “Web browser choice screen” has been added to Internet Explorer users in Europe, its required by the European Commission.
This windows update is being rolled out in March 2010. So if you have not seen this yet then you will very soon (unless you have turned off Windows updates).

I think this browser choice screen is very badly thought out because there is NO option to click "I am happy to stay with my current browser choice, Ignore and don't remind of this again".
On my PC I have the latest versions IE8, Firefox, Opera and Chrome already installed yet as you can see the screen that shows does not say "Already installed" below those browsers.
Surely this is a fundamental error in the layout of this screen as its not very obvious what you need to do to ignore this Browser Choice screen.

If you click on the "Select Later" button then this just hides the Browser Choice window until you reboot next time.

On my Windows 7 machine, when you reboot after this update has installed you will notice that the shortcut to IE on your Quick launch taskbar has gone! I bet lots of people are going to google "My Internet Explorer icon has vanished on Windows 7" after this windows update has gone on.
You will notice as well as the IE8 icon vanishing from your quick launch bar that you now have a new icon on the desktop called "Browser Choice", if you run that then you will get the browser choice window.
I guess the idea of this is to force you to choose IE over other available browsers.

On my XP SP3 machines , when you reboot after this update has been installed it actually runs the Browser choice window without any interaction.

So what do you need to do?
Windows XP:
Well if you are happy with what you already use and want to keep things as they were simply click OK on the first screen then close the second screen. Now delete the Browser Choice icon from your desktop.
Reboot and thats it back to normal. It won't bother asking you ever again.

Windows 7:
Well if you are happy with what you already use and want to keep things as they were simply click OK on the first screen.
If you want to keep Internet Explorer goto the task bar and right click on Internet explorer and select "Pin to Task bar" then close the second screen. Now delete the Browser Choice icon from your desktop.
Reboot and thats it back to normal.
I do not have Vista any more so not sure how that behaves, perhaps someone can post a comment to say if its the same as Windows 7.

Hope this helps those people out there who are not sure.

The screen that shows when you click the OK button on the first screen takes you to this page :
http://www.browserchoice.eu/BrowserChoice/browserchoice_en.htm

For information about this Windows update :
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=976002

There is also a shorcut icon on the desktop which runs :
C:\WINDOWS\system32\browserchoice.exe

If you goto Start - Run and type msconfig and then click on the startup tab you can see its set to run browserchoice every time your computer starts up.


One thing I also don't understand is the selection of browsers its has to offer, Everyone I'm sure will know all of the popular ones such as Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome but also listed are several browsers that I have never heard of, also some that have not been updated for ages such as Maxthon which seems to have been abandoned back in 2008.
As a web designer I have kept en eye on what browsers are popular as things change over the years. There is an upto date table month by month which shows which browsers are popular. See this here :
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
As you can see people KNOW they have a choice of web browser with Firefox being a clear winner these days.
People that only use Internet Explorer are most likely people that don't even know that there are different browsers available, so to suddenly offer a bewilldering range of browsers to these people is going to cause trouble.

I dare say in the days to follow this update will cause lots of chaos with PC users not knowing what to do.

Andy

Windows 7 Audio Driver for ASUS K8V-VM motherboard, Solution to missing sound.

Have you tried the new Microsoft Windows 7 operating System yet?
If you had stuck with Windows XP rather than going over to the rather unstable Vista then you may want to try the new Windows 7 OS. Its a lot better than Vista, not difficult I know!

The ASUS K8V-VM Motherboard.

 I have installed it on an older machine which has an Asus K8V-VM motherboard in it.
It found all the hardware and installed all the drivers but there was no sound at all.
The Volume icon on the system tray showed a red cross in it, hovering over it showed "You do not have speakers or headphone plugged in", even though it did have.
It took quite a while to sort this problem out so I thought I would share this with anyone else out there who has no sound on their ASUS motherboard after installing Windows 7.

The driver I found fixed the problem and I now have sound on Windows 7.
Normally you would visit the download section of the Motherboard manufacturer but the audio drivers offered on the ASUS website for the K8V-VM would not install on Windows 7, but not to worry as I have the solution for you here.

It may be time to think about getting a new PC, ready to go systems are very cheap these days and come with Windows 7 installed so you know all the hardware is going to be compatible with it :


Here are the specifics :

The motherboard (Mainboard) is a ASUS K8V-VM, This uses an Audio Codec "Realtek ALC660" which is a 6-Channel Codec.

To get the Audio Driver you need to visit the website for the actual manufacturer of the Audio Codec.

So visit :
http://www.realtek.com.tw/

Click The Downloads button at the top of the page.
Click the High Definition Audio Codecs (Software) link
Tick "I accept the above" then wait for the page to update then click Next.
You will now see a page of files available for download, at the top of this list is..

Vista, Windows7 Driver (32/64 bits) Driver only (ZIP file)R2.37 2009/11/20 38690k

Click on the first Go link for Site 1 and download the ZIP file.
Once complete, extract all the files from it and run the setup.exe file.
Run through the installation and it will ask you to reboot.
You now have sound !

This codec may fix the no audio problem on many Asus motherboards. I notice on the Realtek site there is a seperate section for downloading Windows 7 drivers for the following codecs..
RTL8100B(L)/RTL8100C(L)/RTL8101L/RTL8139C(L)RTL8139C(L)+/RTL8139D(L)/RTL8100(L)
RTL8130/RTL8139B(L)

Please leave comment if this fixed the no audio problem on Windows 7.

UPDATE: I have noticed over the last few days that sometimes the sound stops working, looking in the devices shows that the driver has gone which is rather strange. Reinstalling it again brings it back to life, I had to do this about 5 times but then it seemed to stay working for ever. Bare this in mind.

If this happens again then I have a permanent solution and that is to buy a USB External Sound Card.
The one I'm looking at is a Creative Soundblaster X-fi Go, this DOES work with Windows 7 and you dont even need to open up your pc to install it.