This is brilliant! We have one of these rusting in the basement at work, this gives me ideas. It would sure beat the dot-matrix printer I've been using to annoy my colleagues, but would definitely be harder to connect to wifi.
Sounds familiar. Chromium (not Chrome) still asks on first use but IIRC defaults to Google if you ignore it. IE (8, I think, whatever came with Win7) offered an option at first run but I've never had the options page actually load, so it defaults to Bing/MSN.