Speed Up Browsing by Disabling Internet Explorer

I had installed Internet Explorer 9.  Now I was getting these completely dumb-assed messages at the bottom of the screen:  "Speed up browsing by disabling add-ons."  The first time, I thought this was a good idea, and I went ahead with that.  When it kept happening, though, I realized I needed to find a way to shut it off.  This post describes how I did that.

One suggestion that came up in my search was to click Disable Addons, on that reminder, and set the reminder time to as high as possible.  It seemed the best one could do was to choose the "Don't Disable" option to be left alone for 30 days.

But I wanted to eliminate this stupid reminder permanently.  A different approach involved making a change in Group Policy settings.  I wasn't sure how to do that, or even to see if I had the option in question, so I ran a search and found a tweaks article that reminded me that I could get into the Local Group Policy Editor via Start > Run > gpedit.msc.

In the policy editor, I didn't see exactly the option described.  The message said to start with the Windows Components area, but there were at least two of those:  one under Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates, and one under User Configuration > Administrative Templates.  I did find Internet Explorer subheadings in both, but neither had a "Disable add-on performance notifications" option.  The advisor told me that I might need to copy updated inetres.admx and inetres.adml files from a machine with IE9 installed, but this machine had IE9 installed already, so that did not seem to apply.

That pretty much exhausted my focused search.  At this time, then, there was no good solution to this problem.  I hoped that the Don't Disable option did indeed give me 30 days of peace.  At the end of that time, it was possible but doubtful (since I rarely used IE, and had just discovered one more reason for that) that I would actually appreciate the reminder.

Google Search: Freeware: Get Rid of Unwanted Sites

I was using Google to search for freeware.  My search produced a bunch of websites that did not give me what I wanted.  This post briefly describes some steps I took to get better search results.

First, I modified my search to eliminate some sites that were giving me a combination of freeware and shareware.  For purposes of this particular search, I figured that any freeware of good quality would have been noticed and commented on by a number of people.  People selling software had a number of strategies to obscure the fact that they were not offering freeware.  Not to blame them -- they worked hard on their software, and they wanted to make some money for it -- but what I was searching for wasn't important enough to buy.  If there was a freeware solution, great; if not, I'd just skip it.  So the modified search I used was this (assuming I was searching for software related to "mouse" and "cursor"):

mouse cursor freeware -shareware -"free download" -"free trial" -"free to try"

This got through one set of unwanted results, but I wasn't done.  Now I was getting a bunch of websites that offered all kinds of freeware, but none providing what I was looking for specifically.  They just seemed to put up any freeware that seemed remotely related, and that wasn't helping me.  I was doing this search in Firefox, and I knew of two ways to get rid of these sorts of sites in Firefox.  (There probably were similar solutions in Google Chrome, but I didn't check.)  One approach was to install the Web of Trust (WOT) add-on, and look for its colored rings next to the search results.  These, I had found, were helpful but sometimes alarmist. 

Another approach, which I used in conjunction with WOT, was to install the OptimizeGoogle add-on, and start to build up its list of list of filters.  The steps here were, first, to install the add-on, and then, in Firefox, go into Tools > Add-ons > Extensions tab > OptimizeGoogle > Options > Filter.  My list of filters was still growing, but at this point the list was as follows:

http://*.recipester.org/*
http://*.neevia.com/*
http://*.headkeys.com/*
http://headkeys.com/*
http://*.all-freeware.com/*
http://*.softducks.com/*
http://*.topshareware.com/*
http://*.top4download.com/*
http://*.xentrik.com/*
http://*.fileguru.com/*
http://*.software.informer.com/*
http://*.filebuzz.com/*
http://*.bestfreewaredownload.com/*
http://*.windows7download.com/*
http://*.freedownloadscenter.com/*
http://*.winsite.com/*
http://*.easyfreeware.com/*
http://*.brothersoft.com/*
http://*.filetransit.com/*
http://*.macshareware.com/*
http://*.fileheap.com/*
http://*.informer.com/*
http://mac.download3000.com/*
http://*.mac360.com/*
http://*.freemacware.com/*
http://www.downv.com/Mac-software-download/*
http://*.downloadatoz.com/*
http://*.ptf.com/*

I saved that list (Export from the filter list) for when I would have to reinstall Firefox.  With this list in place, Google searches in Firefox that found any of these websites would now give me a small, greyed-out line to let me know that my results were being filtered, but would focus on the remaining sites.  This, I found, reduced distraction and saved time in other searches.