Nice "Shop To Win" Tool Bar surprised.

Looks like politicians are running everything now.

Records your banking and credit card sessions too, no doubt, that's the joy of installing these freebie programs ;)

I'd be changing some passwords, and cleaning out the PC, perhaps a bare metal re-install to be sure? How safe you want to be?

Grant.

Chances are, you have a trojan on your PC now. Lurking for that golden opportunity. Time for major de-worming, I'd say, just to be sure.

Watch for unusual hard drive business and for out-of-the-ordinary flickering of the activity light on you Internet modem. Worst case it could mean that some clandestine software is calling home. To a server somewhere in Pilferistan.

This has been wrong for years.

Modern systems have constant hard drive accesses taking place (drive indexing alone guarantees that), and there is a lot of net activity as well by MS, Adobe, and various other folks' "update managers" (Logitech, creative, Kodak, Olympus) run in the background and 'periodically' check for an update. Firefox does too, as does Media Player, and Explorer.

So, you cannot in any way shape or form tell if you are being hacked at by looking at your HD or Modem activity lights.

Also WTF is "unusual"? When your HD light flashes, there is no "usual" or "unusual" indicator light next to it, and there are WAY too many Bckgnd processes going on for a dope like you or him to tell what is or is not "usual".

The other stupid one is "out-of-the-ordinary flickering" (complete with dashes). Again, you have NO CLUE as to what ANY outbound OR inbound traffic on your modem has to do with. Without tracerlogs, you are 100% in the dark.

Over a decade ago, this *might* have been true on say a W98SE box or the like.

Wake up, Rip. Times have changed, and we make bowling balls out of plastic instead of wood now.

So you freely give permissions like that? No manually controlled update manager? I don't.

I can. During the day the yellow modem light is off unless there is initiated web traffic or incoming email. When I leave the office it gets shut off at the power switch.

Nothing stupid about that. After a while one knows what's usual and what likely isn't. But only if the modem light is next to the computer, else there is no learning process and that is necessary. I have been told many times that one cannot diagnose anything that way. The first time when I was a kid and the (seasoned) car mechanic told my dad that the car was brand new and I'd be full of it if I said I heard unusual valve noise. Told my dad that the car mechanic is likely wrong. Sure enough less than 100 miles later ... phhhht clunk ... major valve damage.

But that does not mean I am going to let the guard down at my computer. No way :-)

The whole point I made was that NO YOU DO NOT, IDIOT!

You *think* you know, but you (YOU in particular) have no way of knowing, so your claim is total bullshit.

Where did you download 7zip from? The only safe places where you get the real one are and .

Of course if you got a trojan it's not a free software fault as another poster mistakenly wrote: everything can be repackaged to install malware, and the one and only way to ensure you aren't downloading junk is a short googling. Most known softwares are also on Wikipedia along with a link to their website, 7zip included.

count be but I ran a couple of programs and they seem to think I have nothing more than what I already know I have in it. which is the stock apps that came with the dell XPS and a couple I have since installed.

The other one is Skype that likes to put itself in for a few seconds now and then, why I don't know but it is one that came with the machine. I do have an option to turn that one off too.

As for the HD light, this box is doing the same exact thing my Vista high end laptop does, the HD light blinks at regular intervals. And once in while you'll see a jump but I know what that is, it is either the Weather thing doing some check ups or MaCafee trying to force me in to paying for their cripple product!..

P.S LTspice runs like grease lightning on the Dell XPS.. My old custom Cad app that we use at work operates so fast that I don't even get my finger relaxed from the mouse before it is on the screen bitching at me for being slow.. I did have to open the files up on that and change a couple of things to make W7-64 happy.

Jamie