There has to be a stop on invasion of computers. Advertisers want to know what we want to buy and sneak into our computers to find out what we look at. If you look at car sites, you will be given more car ads. I drowned in pet catalogs when I ordered pet gift online or bought one in a pet store or something. Life was bad enough when we used to fill in registration cards that asked our hobbies, income, and tastes. At least you had a choice to send in the form or not and could write whatever you chose to indicate an interest in. The new advertising schemes actually take over your computer without your permission or knowledge. I do not know why there aren't some laws made so that people can report violations and, at worst, cut the practice down.
Phorm is a new UK trial. " Online advert system Phorm could make the net less secure and breaches human rights, the service's creators have been told." Are they worried? Seemingly not. Hotbar is one of the spyware goodies that invades us. Hotbar consumes over 20MB of disk space on your hard drive. It will slow down your browser, make your PC boot slower, and may crash your computer altogether. Hotbar also disables certain popup blockers. Conversely, if your computer shows any of these symptoms, run Ad-Aware, SpyBot, or any other programs to remove this type of program. Run them frequently! If you find Hotbar on your computer, get it off!
It is sad to note how long this has been a problem and how little has been done about it to stop it.
I resent robots trolling my computer to pick up addresses but resent, even more, friends who insist on mailing me humor with pages of addresses in the forwards. It is bad enough that they are sending addresses out but, worse, they have included mine in full view to be harvested.
Showing posts with label Hotbar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hotbar. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
THE RITE OF SPRING CLEANING
As I watched the weekend fly by, I wasn't washing coal dust off the walls as used to be done in England, but busily doing some computer spring cleaning with the help of a techie friend. We discovered that Adware had accumulated on my computer to the extent that the icons on my Desktop would fade totally after less that a minute on boot-up. You might know that if there is nothing on the desktop, you are unable to get to any program to load. In essence the Adware had successfully functioned as destructively as a virus.
Undoubtedly it need not be upper most on the priority list of our lawmakers, but aren't there a few lesser-involved politicians who might introduce some legislation to make it against the law to drop unwanted, unsolicited pieces of junk on private computers? I understand that, even all those free programs we love, need to be paid for (advertising being the currently preferred method). Should it be lawful that it all be done on the backs of the sole, private computer owner to be forced to use precious time to look up those things on the task manager that are unknown (mine shows 62 processes running at the moment) as well as all the less-visible things? Most of these processes are written in some shorthand that doesn't make clear what they are. If you try to close them you get dire warnings (also that are inexplicable) as to what will befall you.
One, though tedious, way to find out what is running is to Google each process. It ia amazing how many processes have, without asking or receiving permission, decided to run on your computer, slowing down anything else you might be doing. My running Spybot and Ad-Aware several times times eventually rid me, I hope (see fingers crossed here), of all of it for the moment. I then ran a registry cleaner to pick out the debris and defragmented my computer. (I must confess that this all happened, discovery through purge, by a friend who knew what he was doing while I hadn't a clue at the beginning.
This over, I bought a 750 gig external drive and we did a back up of the whole computer after it had been defragmented as well. The backup program started by saying it would take 182 days. It must have been set for a VERY slow CPU because those 182 days speeded it down to 14 hours, long enough to tie the computer up for most of the day. The major culprit in this case was Hotbar.
The amount of time spent on computer maintentance seems equal to, if not exceeding, maintenance of my person and clothing.
Undoubtedly it need not be upper most on the priority list of our lawmakers, but aren't there a few lesser-involved politicians who might introduce some legislation to make it against the law to drop unwanted, unsolicited pieces of junk on private computers? I understand that, even all those free programs we love, need to be paid for (advertising being the currently preferred method). Should it be lawful that it all be done on the backs of the sole, private computer owner to be forced to use precious time to look up those things on the task manager that are unknown (mine shows 62 processes running at the moment) as well as all the less-visible things? Most of these processes are written in some shorthand that doesn't make clear what they are. If you try to close them you get dire warnings (also that are inexplicable) as to what will befall you.
One, though tedious, way to find out what is running is to Google each process. It ia amazing how many processes have, without asking or receiving permission, decided to run on your computer, slowing down anything else you might be doing. My running Spybot and Ad-Aware several times times eventually rid me, I hope (see fingers crossed here), of all of it for the moment. I then ran a registry cleaner to pick out the debris and defragmented my computer. (I must confess that this all happened, discovery through purge, by a friend who knew what he was doing while I hadn't a clue at the beginning.
This over, I bought a 750 gig external drive and we did a back up of the whole computer after it had been defragmented as well. The backup program started by saying it would take 182 days. It must have been set for a VERY slow CPU because those 182 days speeded it down to 14 hours, long enough to tie the computer up for most of the day. The major culprit in this case was Hotbar.
The amount of time spent on computer maintentance seems equal to, if not exceeding, maintenance of my person and clothing.
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