The applet also offers to contact a Microsoft support professional for help with the problem, although you may have to pay for the privilege. Microsoft's IE Performance and Safety diagnostic tool suggests tweaks to the browser's settings to make it safer and faster.Īfter suggesting and implementing the settings changes, the Fix It tool asks whether the problem has been fixed and provides links to the Microsoft community and support sites where you can search for other possible solutions. In addition to recommending that I disable some IE add-ons that were slowing the browser down, the tool suggested that I enable Data Execution Prevention, which I wasn't aware was disabled. The IE Performance and Safety tester takes only few seconds to run, after which you are presented with Microsoft's suggested tweaks. Find out how long each of your IE add-ons takes to load-and disable the ones you don't need-via the IE Performance and Safety tool available in the company's Fix It Solution Center. The IE tool also lets you disable the add-ons you don't need. I'm not sure where I would find this information elsewhere. For example, the Internet Explorer Performance and Safety tester indicates the time each of your Internet Explorer add-ons takes to load. Even if they don't actually fix anything, the troubleshooters provide a wealth of information about your system. I ran several of the Fix It Solution Center's performance and security tools on a Windows 7 notebook. Taking Microsoft's troubleshooting advice Still, you may have a better chance of finding a solution to a specific problem by searching by keyword on the Microsoft Support site. However, the online Fix It tools differ from the troubleshooting utilities built into Windows 7, Office, and other Microsoft products, so at the least they broaden the universe of possible automated fixes for software snafus. I haven't done enough testing to form an opinion one way or the other. Of course, the real test is whether these auto-repair tools actually do any good. The revamped Fix It Solution Center boils troubleshooting down to three steps: pick a product (optional), choose a fix in one of eight categories (and handful of optional subcategories), and then view or run one of Microsoft's many proposed solutions. Microsoft has made it easier to browse for help when one of its products acts up.

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