Hooray!

[Fierce Critter]

Super-massive thanks to Daniel for spending 3 hours online with me last night. With his help and patience, we were able to eliminate the dreaded Globe-Finder and it's related porn hijacks from my computer. Daniel, I can't thank you enough.

I have also been having a problem with AOL, which I managed to get fixed today with the help of their livehelp tecchies.

Man, it's nice to have things functioning normally again.

You tecchie people are just amazing. I'm so thankful for your expertise & willingness to share with those of us who just want to sit down to a properly functioning computer and use the software.

[Shade Everdark]

Yeah. Daniel is good people.

[Vater Araignee]

glad to hear your better now.

I hope you are using antiware and a hosts file.

gotta love those hosts files.

[Head Wreck]

yay for FC

[Brenda Starrr]

Lucky for me, I married a techie. Sadly, when he's out of town on business and I have a problem, I'm just screwed.

[Head Wreck]

ballsing up is the best way to learn iho. you learn not to press the red "wings eject button" ever again :D

plus you get nice people to go through step by step how to fix.

[Fierce Critter]

glad to hear your better now.

I hope you are using antiware and a hosts file.

gotta love those hosts files.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yeah, I have AOL's antiware going, as well as Spybot now. The thing is, when this happened, I THOUGHT I had AOL's antiware going. Its a LONG story, but it wasn't even installed. Now it is.

I also have the Windows firewall activated. I had deactivated it before to use Kazaa, but now that I have SP2 installed and running, it allows for allowing certain things to get through the firewall. Anything I get from kazaa gets scanned with Norton before opening, too. Though I'm less and less likely to download from them with each "ALERT" I get after getting a file off there.

Here's the thing. I'm just a little above your average computer user. I know a lot of software that I self-taught myself. I can do basic computer maintenance. I know how to get into the bios & startups and make some things like port changes, etc. without destroying my computer. But all of that comes with a LOT more effort than I really want to put into my computer "experience".

So with each new, "necessary" newfangled add-on, I get forced into learning waaay more than I really want to about how to maintain a properly running computer.

Some things have been simplified as new computers come out year after year. But in some ways, these "simplifications" require more and more tech knowledge. Again, that's frustrating.

Thus, I have NO IDEA what in the world a "hosts" file is.

I BARELY understand what a firewall is, damn it. Well, that's not true - I DON'T know what a firewall is - I just know that it's a smart idea and that I happen to have one running now.

Damn, even my sister, a 1984 graduate in computer programming & science can't talk me through any of this anymore. Used to be the average home computer user could do everything needed to maintain a system. Those days are SO over.

[Vater Araignee]

Well if your an average computer use then you can type.

YEA!!! You too can create a hosts file.

Basically what it is for is to prevent your comp from wasting time by doing a dns look up.

lets say you want to go to google.com well your browser will query a dns server basically saying "hey what ip address is google.com?" and the server will say "google.com is located at 216.239.57.99" and bingo your off to google.com.

now if you have a hosts file you browser would look in there first and if it saw a line that looked like

216.239.57.99 google.com

Then it would not do a look up it would just go there.

Now lets say I'm anti google and I don't want anybody using my computer to go there.

Well then I would replace the above line with

000.000.000.000 google.com

and BAM my computer would not go there.

It is very useful even though you have to . up date it

but it still blocks adds, porn pop ups (well it does not stop the pop up but it does stop the connection so the pop up wont make more pop ups) ect ect

And the more you add to it the better it becomes. :grin: :grin: :grin: