Microsoft will soon start encouraging users running old versions of Internet Explorer to upgrade to the latest edition of its browser.

People running IE 6 and 7 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 will in the third week of April receive a notification through the Automate Update service that encourages them to upgrade their system to IE 8, Microsoft has said.

This is not a hard sell, though. IE 8, released last month, won't start automatically installing itself on your machine - you'll have to opt in, by clicking the install button itself on the update message's accompanying screen. You can also download from here.

Click here, or not, for Internet Explorer 8

Furthermore, Microsoft re-iterated that users of Automatic Update that want to move to IE 8 in their own time can block the browser's download using its Bitlocker Toolkit released in January.

Users running old versions of Windows, though, will get a nudge in the upgrade direction by Microsoft. Users on Windows XP and Server 2003 will get an upgrade message classified as a "high-priority", whereas those on the newer Windows Vista and Server 2008 operating systems will get an upgrade message categorized as "important". ®

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