while the computer adepts are awake..

Probably not worth it. These tuners can often do more harm than good. I don't really trust Norton to do a good job any more - I have seen the damage that it can do trying to recover JPEG image files.

You can get the OS to show you these startup programs manually and decide for yourself if you need them or not. Create a restore point first in case you later regret your decisions and stop something you shouuldn't have done!

Probably nothing much there to write home about.

You can if you navigate to the holding area where Windows keeps its "temporary" files. You will be amazed at how many prehistoric orphaned files can lurk there on a machine that has been in use for a while.

It is worth purging the accumulated dross once in a while but only essential these days with such huge disks if you are in danger of running out of disk space (which is now quite a rare event).

Remember it is in their interest to make what is found sound as bad and frightening as possible. There is also a fair amount of similar dodgy ransomware out there using more or less the same sort of modus operandi!

Reply to
Martin Brown
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My problems with them started about 6mths ago.

The most consistent issue I have found is with unexplained stopping of the web protection service resulting in an inability to access the internet. This is more likely if protection has been turned off for a period using the Shields Control feature[1] but I have had sites unavailable only to find access available again if shields are turned off.

The other issue was on older hardware (AMD Sempron 2800+ era) where 4 machines of identical build lost internet access as they received a certain update. No easy fix, only recoverable with forced uninstall using their removal tool and reinstall of the latest program version. Various program versions, 6 to 8, all running XP SP2 or 3. Latest fail was on prog v8.0.1483.

Given these problems I wont be using them for a while.

[1] Handy to speed up large file transfers or to speed up a long processing task.
Reply to
fred

Old Codger posted

And even if you do.

I hate software that installs itself in the autorun or startup directories. That's what scumware does. Avoid it.

Reply to
Big Les Wade

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