 Number 217 - June 2001 |
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| Unwanted Programs | ||
| by Merrill Friend, Oct 2000 Bits of Blue, Tampa PCUG | ||
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Over a year ago I
downloaded a trial version of PKZip from the PKWare website. I was told
to try it and if I didn't choose to pay for it to simply uninstall it.
That seemed fair enough. So I downloaded it. I have always respected
this product and its creator's genius but I was drawn between two
choices, whether to use PKWare's PKZip products or to download Winzip,
which may be written by the same people. Winzip, however, is marketed by
a different organization.
I chose Winzip and currently have a registered copy of that product on my unit. I uninstalled the PKWare product, and in checking to see that everything had been removed I found that I now had a new program on my computer, added at the exact date and time that the now uninstalled PKWare product had been added. Apparently piggybacked on the trial version of the PKWare product was this Timesink program which is somehow involved with a firm known as ADGateway. I works, but I am under the impression that every time I use the Internet it somehow reads into my computer and I know it stores ads of some sort onto my hard drive. I recently found that these ads were taking up about 5,900,000 bytes of disk space and this was from a program I never wanted on my computer. Since I didn't want this product I contacted PKWare to find out how to get rid of it since they are the ones who caused it to be there. I received what was to me a |
rather complicated response about how I
could make changes in Registry which would take it away but the writer
recommended that I not do so unless I was a very skilled computer guru
or I might render my computer unusable. So not being a real expert I
left well enough alone, fearing that I might cause worse problems which I
might not be able to correct.
I am disappointed with the PKWare Company for deceptively putting this unwanted program on my computer. I feel that their uninstall program should have removed everything that their trial program added to my hard drive. This, however, is no longer a problem for me since I recently replaced my hard drive and I do not intend to ever again download any trial programs from PKWare or any other similar site. Hopefully that will give me some sort of protection from this sort of thing in the future, but now I wonder just how much of this kind of stuff is going on that I am not aware of!
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Number 217 - June 2001
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