When my Laptop is returned from the nice people at Acer (Hopefully soon) I'm going to perform an experiment, to test Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 Beta against the threats of Adware, Spyware and Trojans, etc.

When the Laptop is returned to me, It will be formatted to factory settings and Internet Explorer 7 beta will be installed, no other programs. Although it will be running Windows XP Home Service Pack 2, I will not allow it to retreive updates from Microsoft or download any anti virus scanners.

I'll try write a daily paragraph of things I notice and at the end of seven days I will install Norton Antivirus, Ewido Malware Remover,ÂÂ! and Adaware Se, and report any findings.

during the week i'll try do things that the common "unaware" internet user would do, such as download MP3's through my browser from free websites, try find keycodes to pirated software, install toolbars etc etc.

Hows that for testing the new IE?

Any suggestions on what to test, which websites to go on, what to download, what to look for etc, would be very helpful.

Thanks
Tom

[size=14px]Day one. 27/06/06[/size]
Installed: Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, The ItsAllPC Tool bar, and Smiley Central.
Websites Visited: Not many other than pages for downloads listed above.
Things Noticed: I've suddenly got two tool bars I didn't want. I was hoping IE7 would have a feature to stop Tool Bars being installed without the users permission. A warning saying something along the lines of "A program is trying to Install a tool bar onto Internet Explorer, Is this ok?"
Aside the tool bars, no noticable problems. Tabs work well, and pages are still brought up fast. Edit - Internet Explorer froze when opening a new window, but recovered 10 seconds later.
[img width=800 height=250]http://i65.photobucket.com/albums/h210/midimoto/toolbars.jpg[/img]

[size=14px]Day two. 28/06/06[/size]
Installed: Nothing.
Websites Visited: MiniClip.com
Things Noticed: Was playing online flash games when completely randomly The screen went blue and filled with tect. The blue screen was there for about one second before the laptop shut off and began to boot up, It checked itself for errors and apparantly repaired one file on the hard disk. Interesting. On restart all programs seem to be working fine.
Update: Crashed again. Microsoft directed me to This page. Once more and I'm pulling the plug on the experiment.

[size=14px]Day three. 29/06/06[/size]
Installed: A 'Codec'
Websites Visited: Serials-Ws.
Things Noticed: I noticed that I could get on the Serials website and view all the serials, even though im running XPSP2, I'm sure that in IE6 with SP2 it would throw so many warnings at you that viewing the Serials was physically impossible, but I didn't get one warning at all.
.
Whilst on the Serials website, I got a bit tempted by the porn video links at the top of the pageÂÂ! . Clickity clickÂÂ! . It wanted me to install a Codec to play the **FREE VIDEO** so I installed it. But the video's still didn't work (Darn it!ÂÂ! ). I'm really interested as to just what has been installed onto my laptop. Probably just a key logger as the overall performance hasnt changed at all. It randomly crashed again with the blue screen though this morning.

[size=14px]Day four. 30/06/06[/size]
Installed: "Zango"
Websites Visited: Mp3shits .comÂÂ! Thats MP3s Hits.. ok?
Things Noticed: Tried downloading an album from the above website. It directed me to a download page for Zango installer. After downloading Zango I notice yet *another* unwanted tool bar, and, finally, I have some noticable adware!. Computer hasnt crashed for a while though, strange.

[size=14px]Day five. 01/07/06[/size]
Installed: Nothing
Websites Visited: None
Things Noticed: Still get pop-ups. No crashes.

[size=14px]Day six. 02/07/06[/size]
Installed: Nothing
Websites Visited: Astlavisa search website
Things Noticed: Searched for Windows Vista. Jumped through some links. Found myself buying Cialis from an American drug store. Closed all the internet explorer windowss and re-launched it. Came onto the itsallpc website, when suddenly IE7 kept opening itself repeatedly, and wouldn't close. It wouldn't even just open new tabs when I pressed CTRL, it just repeatedly launched itself. I managed to restart the laptop and so far it hasnt happened since.

[size=14px]Day seven. 03/07/06 Result Day[/size]
Ewido Malware Remover
410 Errors found. Log Details be be found Here

LavaSoft Ad-aware SE Personal
Only found 138 Errors, although it considers 116 of them to be "Critical". Log report is Here

AVG Anti Virus
AVG Found one Trojan. It wouldn't give me any more information. It did however, scan stright through Zango and not notice one problem.

Hijack This
I tried to go though this list and delete everything that I thought was normal. The remainder can be seen Here. There doesn't look to be anything new here.

[size=16px]Conclusion[/size]
IE7, In my oppinion, is not a safe browser to use. If a user wants to download from a website, The yellow bar appears at the top with a warning, yet almost all websites say "Click the banner and click Install Active X Control", and the average user would do so, making the entire thing utterly pointless.

IE7 has a Phishing filter, it supposedly will warn you when you enter a fake / immitating website. I went on a fair few dodgey websites, and the only warning I got was "The Phising filter service is currently unavailable".

I can't beleive the amount of "Small Trojans" Ewido found... and the result of this little test has almost converted me to a FireFox user. If anyone wants to add to this please do. Its a little short. Comments appreciated.

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I downloaded ie7 beta2 installed, then i found that it firstly took ages to open on my comp, then secondly it kept crashing, and thirdly when i do finally get ie7 to work it takes ages to load pages. so i just unistalled it n use ie6 again . I can't really think of anything else for you to test, but if i do i'll let you know

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Most Of Your Computer Problems Can Be Solved With A Sledge Hammer

go to www. serials.ws

I put a space in there so people don't blindly click it. Anyone using IE prior to Windows XP Service Pack 2, without all the new features turned on will get infected with several interesting spyware programs that are bloody difficult to remove.

any of the crack sites are virus/spyware breeding grounds that encourage people to install special activex objects to facilitate easy spyware installation. Many of them now have really helpful little flash animations telling people how to turn off their security features...

type say windows into the astalavista search engine; www. astalavista.box.sk and clickity click

Looking forward to it.

I was going to test IE7 myself, but the concept of spending hours removing spyware infections reminded me too much of my old job

i strongly wouldn't recommend ie7 anyway, runs too slow, and always crashes, well it does on my computer, also it constatnly asks you to change ur security settings

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Most Of Your Computer Problems Can Be Solved With A Sledge Hammer

I was running it on my Laptop before I had to send it away (Only, with Virus scanners etc) and It worked fine. The Tab's need to be tweaked a little for my liking, but I will deffinately use them.

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I used it for nearly a week when I first installed Vista beta, although I didn't browse anywhere that could contain broken or suspect content

It runs well enough, but it still seems slower rendering pages than firefox

Experiment Begins today, 27/06/06.

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If I have helped you, please consider donating a little cash to Cancer Research UK

Update ^.

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I can't believe it took more than 24hrs to ruin your merriment. :P

I was expecting it to get through smiley central. I mean... umm... *sigh*.

I hope it doesn't do it again. I wanted to get stuck into some really dodgey websites. >

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Anyone got any more websites to have a quick look on?

Tommorow I'll download some MP3's but I cant think of anything else.

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I Beat Anorexia.

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Experiment over...

Ill be.... er... Formatting my Laptop now... >

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I Beat Anorexia.

If I have helped you, please consider donating a little cash to Cancer Research UK