(CLICK ON EITHER IMAGE TO SEE IT FULL SIZE)
(CLICK ON EITHER IMAGE TO SEE IT FULL SIZE)
The top image was from someone I was helping to clean up their computer. The bottom image is from an online forum "friend" that showed me their worse case customer. Neither of these customers knew about the F11 key, which will compact all of the toolbars of a browser to give you more web page viewing real estate on your monitor so they only had an inch or two of web page viewing and had to scroll down one or a couple of lines at a time to read a website.
Now... for the way you SHOULD install a new program... to make sure you avoid this toolbar HELL situation.
After downloading many common programs, during the initial installation process, the program almost always offers you the choice of doing a custom installation or their "recommended" installation. ALWAYS choose "custom" as many programs, as part of being FREE, have various add-on's installed when installing the main program. Other companies pay to have their program added-on or piggybacked onto the main program you actually wanted. Oftentimes, these add-ons are one of the many toolbars or search bars offered by all of the legitimate BIG companies like Google, MSN/Bing, Yahoo, etc.... but many other toolbars or add-ons are from smaller and sometimes less scrupulous companies, many times being actual spyware, depending on what program you downloaded and installed.
Legitimate programs like various computer security programs (most antivirus, antimalware, antispyware), Adobe Flash, Sun Java, instant messengers, media players, etc., will offer various add-on's but give you the option to un-check them during the regular or custom installation process... and in my opinion, UNLESS you absolutely have to have the toolbar or add-on, you SHOULD UN-CHECK them since more than one toolbar and too many add-ons will start to cause problems with your browser and cause you to suffer from much slower web surfing or your browser will constantly freeze up or have other issues. They will also use up a lot of your computer's resources and/or slow down your computer.
Some of the less scrupulous or outright malicious companies will add-on a malware infested toolbar and will not even tell you they are doing it during the installation... or seriously misrepresent what it does. This is why you should ALWAYS Google or search for more information about any program you are going to install on your computer... BEFORE you install it and then find out it's a program from HELL with yet another toolbar or add-on from HELL. Malicious add-ons will hijack your browser's home page and/or add adware that will only send you to sites that are part of their advertising network. Other malicious add-ons will install trojans, viruses, spyware, adware, etc., on your computer and you will have to spend hours cleaning all the crap off of it. Until you do, your computer could become part of a bot-net where the masterminds of the malware are using your computer and surfing habits to track everything you are doing on your computer... or to send spam, send out infected emails trying to infect others, or they will go through your computer looking for banking information or other personal information and steal your identity.
I hope this helps save one or two people from the BROWSER TOOLBAR FROM HELLLLL!!!!!!
Lenny Vasbinder
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Click this link, http://lennyvasbinder.blogspot.com/search/label/Computers, for all of my other Computer related blogs.
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