Customizing Internet Explorer 11 using the IEAK

I was having a discussion with my manager about Internet Explorer 11 and its “Enterprise Mode” recently when I had the idea for a couple of posts on this subject. I thought I’d start off with customizing IE using the IE Administration Kit (IEAK) and then move onto configuring Enterprise Mode using Group Policy in a follow-up post.

There’s not really much to the admin kit and customizing IE is a pretty straightforward process. Let’s take a look at the process here.

Install the IE Administration Kit (IEAK)

Download the IEAK from Microsoft and proceed with the installation. The installation wizard is pretty self-explanatory. Be sure to select the correct licence type as shown below:

Download the Prerequisite Updates for IE11

Download the prerequisite updates from Microsoft and save them all in one directory. Extract each update package one by one using something like 7-Zip which will give us the .cab cabinet file which we’ll bake into our IE11 installer later on.

Here’s an example of an update package after it’s been extracted. Note that we need the cabinet file with the same name as the update.

Customize IE using the IEAK

Launch the Internet Explorer Customization Wizard from Start > Windows IEAK 11

A lot of the screens in the wizard are self-explanatory so I won’t provide screenshots for them all here.

1) Select the destination folder where you want the final IE11 installer to be saved

Windows 7 up and running

Having installed Windows 7, the first thing I noticed was that the graphics performance wasn’t great – window animations wasn’t very smooth, which was to be expected in the absence of a decent graphics card. I adjusted the visual effects to remove some animation features and visual effects I could do without to improve the PC’s performance somewhat.

The only driver I had to install was audio – i initially found the audio would only work when the earphone was plugged in (I had left my earphone plugged in whilst installing the OS).

Wireless dongle working ok, though I have noticed that browsing the Internet is slightly slower compared to XP (my preferred browser is Google Chrome), but its nothing to be worried about it I think.

I recorded the installation using a camcorder and hope to upload the video once I’m done working on it.

Pre-installation – making way for Windows 7

I want to dual boot my pc with XP and Windows 7. With XP already installed I don’t want to re-install it from scratch, since I haven’t yet created a backup image of a fresh XP installation on this pc as I had done with my old computer. (In case you’re wondering, my preferred choice of disk imaging software is Macrium Reflect).

Partition Wizard Home Edition is a great software to resize/format partitions on the fly without losing data, which is exactly what I’ve used to make space for Windows 7 on my computer. Here’s a look at my partition before and after using Partition Wizard.  I now have 150GB free disk space to install Windows 7!

Right, now thats all done I think I’m ready for the installation!

Installing Windows 7 – background info

A few months ago I got my hands on a HP pc from a cousin. It’s a decent spec machine so naturally I wanted to install Windows 7 on it. However, since I had too much going on with planning my wedding plus didn’t have the Windows 7 installation disk to hand, I decided to install XP on it in the meantime. Also I knew I will be editing my wedding video myself and obviously thought that the video editing software (Cyberlink PowerDirector 8 ) would run better on XP.

Now that I’m all done editing my wedding video and am happy with the results I can finally make a start with installing Windows 7 and will be posting updates on how I’m getting on.