Mostly: Classical

[Sexton O Blake]

Cookies and other lodged sharp foreign objects

I visited a site once and, it happened so quickly, something started to download and I accidently said YES to trust and boom I had a pretty bad ad product on my machine. Popups on my computer when I booted up amoungst other fun.

Without going into the gorry details on getting rid of it - it was BRUTAL. Registry searching; windows/system32 searching. Anyways it was non-stop - it was all over the place named differently.

I ended up buying Pest Patrol - the program is about $35US and comes with a year worth of updates. Basically like a VIRUS checker it runs in the background monitoring stuff placed in memory and cookies etc.

No they are not viri - to be caught by Norton or McAfee - these are things that are not considered viri but are troublesome. I found ad cookies from Sympatico.ca no less. Anyways the program scans specific directories (as you choose) and also the system registry for "programs" that start. Once found you can go to their site and see what this "candidate" does. And eliminate them. Once the main scan is done, the memory and cookie "patrols" work on a regular basis (no different than how a virus program works).

Caveat: I did have some issues in removing the main one I found (above). You see I removed it all manually then somehow it reappeared when I went back to the site (I am a masochist you know). I gave up wasting fixing it and bought this. This program did a good job overall but I did find a few KNOWN pieces of this software still on my system - perhaps they were just unharmful remains though. I was sort of expecting all parts to be removed - perhaps if I persued with the company tech team - but I had spent no less than about 2 hours EACH OCCURRENCE to fix this so I was in no mood to keep this going on.

I would, however, recommend this product for those people that visit lots of sites. I had a LOT of these cookies and other crap on my machine - now it is free - you can even have a vocal sound telling you that an ad cookie was removed.

My time is worth more than $35US. And it buys piece of mind too.

Blather ended..

Blake