Our company is Microsoft certified, which gives us some great perks. One of the biggest is we’re able to get all the Microsoft titles to test, and develop on. I decided to give IE 7 beta a shot to see exact where Microsoft was going with their browser (and who they were stealing from now). After a relatively quick installation, I went ahead and tried to open IE.

FAIL
Something with my computers configuration affected the beta version of IE. So now it won’t load. Oh well it was beta, right? I went to using System Restore to go back to a working IE 6 configuration, but it broke when I tried to open the application. So now, as if living without IE wasn’t bad enough, Outlook 2003, cannot read e-mails either. It’s amazing how many applications do not work without Internet Explorer. Even AOL Instant Messenger fails to load. I am very concerned with Windows reliance on a web browser.

Well it’s been almost two years since my last format, so I guess my time has been coming. I am very concerned that I was unable to do a system restore without having Internet Explorer installed. What else doesn’t work? It’s a safe bet a large number of Microsoft applications in Windows reference pieces of IE.

On that note I am going to take this opportunity to test Windows XP 64-bit with a new computer. Since I have so much data on my old computer (which is barely functional without IE) I hate to format it. Besides, it was running slow anyway!