I’ll be viewing or working on some website and my browser will suddenly revert back to my home page, in this case, Yahoo. Or I’ll be working in a program, say Quicken, and a browser window will suddenly open and switch my screen to Yahoo in the new the browser window. It is very frustrating. Anyone know why it’s doing this?
Second problem: I have this little website caught in my machine and I’m mad at it and want it gone. It’s a spam site, http://continue.to/walmartgift. I’ve cleared my history, deleted the cookies, cleared my temp files, searched for it, searched the registry for it, but can’t find it anywhere to get rid of it. When I type http://c in my browser (MS Explorer), it automatically fills in the rest of the site. I’d like to keep the auto-fill function. Any idea where this little culprit is hiding? Maybe I should hire Dick Cheney to take it out.
Nothing that 70 bucks can’nt fix. Junk like this that gets into computers is why we have to get new ones every 2 1/2 to 3 years.
Nice website Gilby. I just registered today and am impressed at how much is devoted to this new hobby of ours. Paul and Alex have been riding for about three years and I’ve got one year of riding in.
Anyhow, I just wanted to say Hi and test the reply.
That site could be hiding in the index.dat file. It’s a file that IE uses as an index to quickly enumerate all the sites you have visited (for cookies, the cache, etc.). The file eventually gets bloated and filled with sites that you would rather not have IE remember.
You can delete the file manually if you jump through a few hoops. But it is tricky because the file is hidden, it’s a system file, and gets opened when Windows boots. Fortunately there are utilities that will delete the file for you.
I have used Index.dat Suite. Another similar utility that has gotten mention is CoffeeCup Privacy Cleaner, but I’ve never tried it. Run one of those programs to clean (delete) the index.dat file and I suspect that annoying spam URL will disappear.
If you are nosey and want to snoop on where other people have surfed with IE you can use the Index.dat Suite to browse through the index.dat file. Clearing the cache and cookies in IE will not delete or clear the index.dat file. Most people don’t know about the index.dat file and what it stores so they end up leaving it behind when they try to cover their tracks for where they’ve been with IE.
The new version of Firefox sucks. I am growing to hate it more and more the more I use it. It is a complete memory pig. A heavy browsing session where you have multiple tabs and Firefox sessions open can use up enough memory to slow down the entire computer, forcing other applications and Firefox itself to get paged out to the swap file. It’s a pig. Pig pig pig pig pig
The browser isn’t the most important application on my computer. It’s just a browser, a utility application. It has no business thinking it can use up so much memory that the overall performance of the computer suffers.
