Mailbag for September 20, 2010

Mailbag: September 20, 2010

This week in the mailbag:

How Do You Remove Windows XP from Dual-Booting with Windows 7?
Internet Explorer 9 Does Not Load Add-Ons for Pinned Web Sites
64-Bit IE 9 and Pinned Web Sites
Some TechNet Standard License Keys Drop from 10 to 2; Pro Drops from 10 to 5
Good Old Games, R.I.P.
Installing iTunes Without the Bloat

Have a question? I can't guarantee an answer, but I'll try. Drop me a note! (And let me know if you'd prefer not to have your name published.)

Dillon D. asks:

No, but it's easy enough: You can remove the XP partition/hard drive with Windows 7's built-in disk partitioning tools (Start Menu Search, disk part). Then, you can make the boot menu disappear by accessing System Properties, Advanced system properties, Startup and Recovery - Settings, and changing the menu display time to 0 seconds. But if you want to actually remove XP from the boot menu all together, you'll need a boot menu editor like EasyBCD.

I salute you for deciding to remove XP, by the way. :)

As more and more people have begun using the Internet Explorer 9 Beta, I've started getting a number of emails related to this release. One of the more common involves browser add-ons: It seems that IE 9 does not load add-ons for pinned web sites. So I asked Microsoft for the rationale behind this. Their response is:

Fair enough, but I'm still trying to figure out if this behavior is going to be an issue. I've had some troubles with Last Pass, arguably the most necessary IE add-on ever made, but I'm not sure if that's tied to this new pinned mode or something else. Based on my email, a number of readers have had similar issues.

On a related vein, IE 9 does not include a spell checker and it desperately needs one. I'd used such things as IESpell in the past, but what I really want is something that works on the fly, as does the built-in spell-checking functionality in Chrome. Perhaps IE 7 Pro?

I didn't think anyone was using the 64-bit versions of Internet Explorer, but clearly I'm wrong. I received several emails about the recent IE 9 Beta release and how it works, or doesn't work, with pinned web sites. Jeff P. provides a typical example of this question:

I had never thought to test this, but if you pin a web site from the 64-bit version of IE 9, the pinned version of the site runs under the normal 32-bit version of the browser, not the 64-bit version. I'm not clear on why this is so, especially when you consider that IE 9 doesn't load add-ons for pinned sites anyway. (See above; 64-bit versions of IE are generally incompatible with most add-ons.)

The most common email this week, perhaps, was about a sudden and unexpected change in the way that Microsoft's new TechNet Standard subscription works. That is, for most software products--Windows 7, Office 2010, whatever--subscribers received 10 product keys. But this past week, all of a sudden, that dropped to 2. What gives?

This bit came from the Microsoft online support forums and suggested that it was all a mistake:

So that's good news, right? Not so fast. According to a reader who chooses to remain anonymous, Microsoft just sent out the following email:

So I called TechNet myself. And what I discovered is that, yes, Microsoft did just change the terms of the TechNet Standard and Pro subscriptions. For the Standard subscription, Microsoft is only providing two product keys for Office 2007, Office 2010, Windows XP, and Windows 7. For Professional, it's five; both were previously ten. However, subscribers can request additional keys via email. And I verified with Microsoft that each product key is still good for ten activations.

The TechNet Standard subscription is still an excellent deal, of course, and I should once again point out that this product is for evaluation purposes only, not so you can inexpensively install Windows 7 on every PC in the neighborhood. But I do understand why existing subscribers are upset that Microsoft quietly changed the terms of the subscription. It was kind of a lousy thing to do.

A number of readers wrote in to tell me that one of my Windows Weekly software picks of the week, Good Old Games, or GOG.com, is dead.

And the letter from the GOG.com team...

This is a shame. GOG was one of those great services, with great (old) games, with no DRM at all. It was too good to be true, or at least too good to last.

Sam B. pointed me towards an Ed Bott blog post, the unofficial guide to installing iTunes 10 without bloatware, which seeks to unravel Apple's complex iTunes installer so that you can install only what you need:

So, this is valuable information, of course. It doesn't really solve my central problem with iTunes, however, which is that iTunes itself is a pig and needs to be put down. Which is why I've been exploring alternatives more actively than usual. But Ed's guide is useful, even to those who do you use iTunes everyday. At the very least, learn how to kill those unnecessary boot-time pre-loaders.