What's on your mind today?

[Asmodean]

Any-one not wanting to reinstall the operating system after upgrading memory capacity.

[Icarus]

I will embark on some adventures with the computer fix when I get a bit more time to mess with it. Over a long time of dealing with computers confusions I have become less intimidated but more resigned to acknowledge my ignorance.. My first adventure with computers was with a TRS80, commonly called Trash80. Actually I got along well with it. In those days the magic box was not nearly so demanding of ones depth of knowledge.

Meanwhile I am dealing with the replacement machine and trying to persuade it to do what I want it to do. It had a bunch of installed apps that I do not want. I am cautiously uninstalling such stuff as Microsoft Edge and other bits and pieces.  I have used Firefox for years and I ain't gonna change at this late date.

 Thanks much for the information.

[Recusant]

What be going on where now?

Ah, that was a reference to the fires in and around LA.

[Asmodean]

That's right! I've heard about those.

As misfortune would have it, most of what I heard was political posturing. Is it not better to put out the damned fire, and then point fingers and write slogans?

Who-did-and-didn't-do-what has its time and its place. Whether that time is when the roof is literally on fire and that place is underneath said roof, on the other hand... May be worth contemplating.

[Tom62]

My stepmother died last Thursday. She had to go to the hospital just before Christmas with kidney problems. In the hospital they found out that she had the same cancer as me. Unfortunately the cancer had already spread to other parts of the body. Not willing to go through a painful end of life, my 87th years old stepmother gave up the will to live.

[Icarus]

Have been cursed with the annoying McAfee popup. The ad is a fake and a scam. It is maddening to have the popup appear at approximately 5 minute intervals. It has no little upper right x that will make it go away. You have to click three other x's to get the next five minutes of uninterrupted use of the computer. Maddening !!

[Recusant]

Sorry to hear about your stepmother, Tom. I hope she succeeded and that it was mostly not too painful for her.

[Recusant]

Icarus there's a McAfee uninstaller--"MCPR Tool" which usually works but if that is insufficient, there are further steps you can take to scrub the remnants. That lunatic's name will be with us for a while, even if he's not.

[Icarus]

The accursed McAfee popup is a fiendish way to extract money from the innocents. It is not a real McAfee ad though it uses familiar looking graphics. It pops up in such a way as to obscure whatever is on the screen. It cannot be simply x ed out.

The scammers offer to give you one of the McAfee fix-it programs for $50. The same program from Amazon is $24. Of course the the poor buyer would need to give the scammers their credit card information. I may be old and feeble minded but not that feeble....yet.

Recusant, Thanks for the tip about getting rid of the miserable thing. Actually I have used a free virus fixer to remove the intruding popup, and it worked.  However.........The free virus remover itself may be a slick way to hold me hostage at some time in the future.

I am typing this with an old replacement desktop. If it gets too sticky, I will trash the damned thing. The one that I had been using smoked off the hard drive. I am in the process of repairing it or having it repaired by someone who knows what they are doing.   

[Asmodean]

It may be that you have a mild case of malware.

Some malware is designed in such a way as to avoid the attention from your antivirus suite - mostly through being a legitimate application, serving illegitimate content and such-like.

You could look at your list of running programs (Ctrl + Alt + Delete when the popup is active) and see if you could spot it, then do a targeted uninstall, but it can also be a browser addon, in which case that wouldn't necessarilly help - it would, however, help to manage your browser addons and uninstall any and all that you don't know whether or not you use for anything productive. If the problem persists after one or both steps, then it may be a case of adware as a part of some program or addon that you do use. Some developers finance their projects that way. Distasteful, but such is life.

[Icarus]

Thanks for all the good information and advice.

I have defeated the miserable popup, at least for the time being.  Actually the intrusive popup is pretty common because there are dozens of fixes described on you tube and elsewhere. None of the ones I tried worked for me. The antivirus app did make the problem go away. For now I am good to go.

[Asmodean]

Excellent! If you have not, you should schedule your antivirus to run a system scan every now and again. It does can help.

[Icarus]

I was a US Coast Guardsman a long time ago when I was in the military.  My commanding officer was named Martinsen. He told me that the Swedes spell the last three letters of sir names with the vowel O. As in MartinsOn  Norwegians spell sir names with the vowel e, as in MartinsEn.

Is that true or was he simply making sure that I spelled his name as he wished it to be. He did be certain to say that his ancestors were from Norway.

Commander MartinsEn was one of the several people in my life that I have held in highest esteem. Not because he was my commander but because he was a damned fine man who truly cared about all the people within his scope of influence and elsewhere.  This world surely needs a lot more men like him.

[Asmodean]

It is true. Norwegian and Danish spelling is -sen. Icelandic and Swedish is -son.

I believe that our way of spelling is of Danish origin, while the Swedish/Icelandic way goes back to the common roots of the four languages.

-sen does still obviously mean "son [of]" but interestingly, "son" in Norwegian is sønn, where the ø is pronounced as something inbetween o and e. It's the same sound as the Swedish one with them dots; ö. coincidentally, ö in Sewdish means island. We do still pronounce "e" in "sen" as you would the beginning of "center." Well... Unless you are from like NZ or some such. Then you might prolly call it "cinter" or whatever else weirdness them's do over there.

[Icarus]

Language and names are fascinating. Thanks for the authentic information Asmodeansen.