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Ok so I'm watching cartoons online and window came up and asked me to install license yada yada and stupidly I clicked yes by mistake instead of no. Naturally I had no intention of clicking yes, but now I'm screwed. I've used Spydoctor, spysweeper, regcleaner, and adaware to try and get rid of the pop ups that now plague my every step on the web. I use pop up blocker to no avail. I've deleted my cookies, and offline content a few times. no luck (I'm using IE btw). Any advise would be appreciated.

Goto the run command and type msconfig then run it.

When the window pops up goto startup tab and look for any programs that should not be there or you don't recognise. Get the search tool to locate where they are installed anything that is not connected to windows or one of your known programs is likely to be a browser hijacker so locate it and delete it and any folder that it might have created, you might have to shut it down first using Ctrl Alt Delete and end proccess as some just reinstall themselves if not shut down first.

Then reboot and see if your problem is solved.

Hope this helps

Ooooh, I think I know what got you ...

I had to talk my sister through the removal of this a couple weeks ago. It was a b*tch.

Grif, there's no way to just "delete" this thing. It puts itself in a way that it just reinstalls itself if it gets deleted. It actually has to be uninstalled. Now, if it's the same as my sister's, you should go into your "add/remove programs" in the control panel and look for something like "search tool" or some such program that you know doesn't belong ... something like "Windows Search Tool" or "Windows Internet Search Assistant" ... something like that. Just remove it like you would any other program. If it's the same thing, that should do it.

We spend hours trying to remove it from the registry and the services and deleting stuff and none of it worked until we just ran the uninstaller.

If I'm not mistaken, you'll also find references to it in your "services" ... but you can't remove it from there - I tried. Post here if you want me to try to talk you through it - I'll give you a call and we can nail this.

The other thing to try is to look at the running processes and try to find the one that looks like it doesn't belong. This is tough unless you are pretty familiar with what is supposed to be there. If you find which process it is, you can search it on google and there's usually plenty of posts with directions to remove it. Post a list of what's running (Processes Tab of windows task manager) and one of us could probably point it out with a little searching.

-Bri

I'm a father of two, I'm pre-programmed to say NO to everything by default!! :lol:

hmmm.. not sure if it's in my msconfig or no, but it's definitely not in my add/remove programs. I went into msconfig and it all looked kosher. Perhaps I'll post my task manager processes and see what you guys think. Any other ideas would be helpful. Thanks guys!

Grifter,

Try booting your computer in SAFE MODE and then run all your spyware, antivirus software programs. When you boot the computer normally, all these annoying popup programs are run and kept in resident memory and wont get removed with spyware. Try doing this in SAFE MODE and see if it helps. If it doesn't, then do a google search for the program in question (My Search bar for example), typing in My Search Bar removal, and they might have some solutions to steps to take for removal.

If you still can't fix it, it's probably reformat time. Those Bastards.

reformat might just get you that new drive installed anyway... ;)

Don't forget that you have remote access facility available to you with WinXP, and much as it's not something many are very keen on, you can trust any of the guys from our group to help you out and not screw with the rest of your system.

you can create a remote assistance request and send it via e-mail (save as a file and then attach it). then Raptor or myself or Softball can connect to your pc and look at it - i did it for Slamhammer a few weeks ago and got him fixed up.

Yeah, ain't that the truth!! :lol:

First of all, thanks for you help guys. I really really appreciate it. It's a relatively minor, if not irritating problem though. If anything, it does give me incentive to install Steel's HD and just do a fresh install of all my stuff. Not the end of the world really, everything is backed up on cdrom

...or most stuff anyway, I threw out my Nixon Watergate recordings and the secret map JPG. to where I hid Jimmy Hoffa years ago....

Anyway, I really appreciate the hlep and most likely if SB's Safe mode thing don't work, I'll do a new HD/software install in the near future...when I have a free moment. As some of you know, I'm currently working on getting a new teaching position, so a lot of worry and time spent stressing over that for the time being.

I'm looking at swapping hard drives over soon too. From my 80GB drive to the 120GB drive, just to give myself a little more space really. And sometime in the future I hope to get my hands on a SATA drive to help speed things along a little too.

sata will not help you with performance...

sata drives, with the exception of the raptor drives, are just ide drives with a sata controller instead of an ide controller.

you will not start to see performance differences until you are using raptors or new (not yet released) sata2 drives on a sata 2 controller.

We use SATA drives at work, and our SATA drive (166Mhz Bus) is noticably faster than our IDE ATA/100 drive on the same computer. We do a lot of video editing and manipulation using both drives and there is a noticable difference with file transfer speeds with the SATA drive.

Another example, we formatted both drives when we built the computer, the SATA drive (200gig) formatted in 30 seconds, and the IDE drive (200gig) took 30 min.

So, from my experience, SATA drives are a bit faster as far as data transfer speeds.

Double post 4tL. Grrrr!

Um, are you sure you didn't just quick format one drive and not the other?Unless there are other differences like RPM I can't believe there was that much difference!

exactly... do some real benchmark tests, and make sure you include linux as well. also make sure the ide was as new a drive as the sata - ide drives have sped up quite a bit over time... also, you need to make sure you are using equivalent drivers...and equivalent amount of cache on each drives controller and do not have a raid or other controller that has built in cache for read and write... lots of details to pay attention to when you do benchmarking.

Well, before I buy anything more for my system apart from the basics, I'll be starting a decent discussion like this. I enjoy seeing what eveyone has to say about it. It usually helps just settle any decision or highlight any problems.

You can be sure that whatever you decide, there will be at least one person here to tell you how wrong you are. ;)

Of course, sometimes it's me who's doing the disagreeing. But that's a comforting thing too - in this group, at least you're getting a decent cross-ref on stuff by people who don't want to see you buy crap and will always give an honest personal opinion, and try to help paint the right picture for you with other reviews and such. With others you never know, because you just don't trust their judgement.