9-29-06 Tips

Todays tip list is short but I will have more in the next few days

If your taskbar is on the right edge of your screen and you want to return the taskbar to the bottom of your screen do this:

Position your mouse cursor at the bottom of your vertically placed taskbar and move it to the very left edge - keeping the mouse cursor at the bottom. Then hold down your left mouse button and quickly drag it directly to the left while holding in the left mouse button.

Now practice moving it up to the right edge again. Grab the taskbar at the very top-right corner, hold down the left-mouse button and drag your mouse directly upwards. Now repeat the step above to move it back to the bottom edge of your screen.

By grabbing your taskbar at various points, holding your left mouse button in and dragging it in the direction you want to move it, you can place your taskbar at the top, bottom, right or left edge of your screen. That's a "feature" of Windows that most people don't use. I've never seen anyone that uses the taskbar on the left or right edge. I have used it at the top before (it's not too bad when it's at the top, but it takes some getting used to). But I'd bet that 99% of Windows users have their taskbar at the bottom of the screen - and if they don't it's because they accidentally moved it to the side and don't know how to get it back :).

My homepage was Msn.com until this morning. When I opened Internet Explorer it went to a site I have never heard of securityuptodate.net. And I can't get rid of it. What is it and why can't I get my homepage back?

Answer
We took a look at your browser tags which are submitted with the Web comments and here (minus your IP address) they are:

(HTTP_USER_AGENT: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; FunWebProducts; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

We hate to keep harping on FunWebProducts and the tricks they play on users, but here again, we cannot really tell you what's wrong because you have the ad*ware/hijacker FunWebProducts installed. When you install this bundle of ad*ware and hijackers, normal Windows registry entries are replaced by hundreds, even thousands of special registry entries - these are system changes made by FunWebProducts and its current bundle of 14 un-related software (ad*ware/hijacker) applications. Whether or not your problem is related to FunWebProducts or not we cannot know. FunWebProducts has access to your computer directly, every time you're online. So who's paying them today to do what to their users we cannot know. We suggest you get rid of FunWebProducts first, because your home page and search results will always be subject to the whims of FunWebProducts as long as its installed. While, some of FunWebProducts components appear in Control Panel/Add or Remove Programs, not ALL of them do. The only way to get rid of everything related to FunWebProducts on your computer is with a good anti-spy*ware program like Spy*ware Doctor. Even then, there may be bits and piece of this bundle left on your computer - but at least they'll inoperable and not able to change your computer's setting anymore.

Now before we get blasted for mentioning "FunWebProducts" we want to point out that the only reason we mention it is because unless it is removed the potential exists for FunWebProducts to hijack start pages and searches. Those are facts. And when something like FunWebProducts is installed on a computer and the owner is having problems changing his/her start page, FunWebProducts must be eliminated as one of the potential causes. So see? It was really necessary because Pat indicates that her home page (start page) was hijacked. We're trying to help her!

Once you've gotten rid of FunWebProducts you can follow normal Windows/Internet Explorer procedure to change your home page back to MSN (if that's what you want). If you don't know the correct procedure for setting a Start Page in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, or Netscape, see this Tutorial which explains how to set our own Start Page as your start page. If you don't want to use our start page as your home page, just substitute the page you'd rather use.

It's important that you understand that you must remove any spy*ware/ad*ware or hijackers before you attempt to reset your home page. Otherwise, it will be an exercise in futility; because most ad*ware/spy*ware and hijackers that change your home (or 'Start') page, will gray out the options to reset your home page in your browser. Others will simply allow you to change it, and then change it back to the bad one every time you reboot.

Go to this site to learn what Host files are

More to come Carol