Disable Chrome Frame

Now that Google has ended support for Chrome Frame (see here) the time has come to transition to their new Legacy Browser Extension.  I've run into a few systems that I'm unable to remove Chrome Frame from.  This wouldn't be an issue except that we have a new site that's IE only, and Chrome Frame is ignoring the policy to render the site with IE.  So now they open it in Chrome, the LBS extension kicks them over to IE and then it gets rendered in Chrome Frame.  That's extremely helpful, right?  Easiest solution is to remove Chrome Frame, right?  That would work great if it would uninstall, but the uninstaller fails.  So I tried to install a newer version so I that I could maybe get it to uninstall.  That didn't work either, the installer fails.  So what about a quick and dirty way to disable Google Chrome Frame?  You can go into IE and disable it through the Add-On Manager, but I need to disable it on a bunch of machines.  How can you do that?  Just push the registry key to the machine that says disable the Chrome Frame.  What is that registry key?  Actually, it's two keys and here they are (just cut and paste this into a .reg file for easy import).

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Ext\Settings\{ECB3C477-1A0A-44BD-BB57-78F9EFE34FA7}]"Flags"=dword:00000001"Version"="*"

Import those keys to disable it and just delete them to re-enable.  Which hopefully you will never have to do once you get Legacy Browser Support up and going.

This is for my old XP machines.  I haven't run into this issue on Windows 7 yet, so I haven't bothered with testing it there.

Asus Chromeboxes are almost here!

It's been a month since I first went on about a new Chromebox from Asus (see here), but they have finally arrived... almost.  AnandTech is reporting (here) that the boxes are available for pre-order Newegg, Amazon, and TigerDirect.  The one change from the initial press release is that the systems are not going to be fanless.  The fans are supposed to be variable speed and not required to run all the time so noise shouldn't be a major issue.  However, I do miss the whole "no moving parts" thing.  As a plan to use these for a replacement for a thin client I do wonder how the fan will affect it's longevity.  I guess I'd rather have the box running cooler, but moving parts are more likely to fail that solid state parts.  I just hope they chose to use high quality parts in their fans.