The Kaizen Blog

Attempts to continually improve in all walks of life

Automate Enabling and Disabling IE Proxy settings

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When I work from home, I connect to the corporate network over the VPN and need to use the corporate proxy server. When I’m not working, I do not need to go through the proxy. Similarly, when I need to connect to my Wireless router at home, I do not need proxy. It was getting cumbersome each time to manually turn on/off these IE settings. So I decided to automate this.

I knew this could be done through registry scripts. Little bit of googling revealed the appropriate keys to be modified. I exported the appropriate tree from registry editor into .reg file. Removed most of the keys I was not interested in. Created two copies, one to enable and other to disable. Saved them as .reg files. Half of the battle was won.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
"ProxyEnable"=dword:00000001

Change the ProxyEnable to zero, to disable the proxy.

.reg extension is automatically associated with Registry Editor. But default mode is interactive, which wasn’t too nice. So I went to /s switch for silent. Next create two batch files that call the regedit.exe with /s switch and appropriate .reg file.

This can be further automated by creating shortcuts inside your faviourite application launcher. (Launchy, Slickrun and my favourite DOMercury)

Written by Mandar Vaze

April 14, 2008 at 5:44 am

Posted in Productivity, Technical

Tagged with , ,

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