Saturday 15 December 2012

Beware rogue toolbars.

Well, thank goodness for that!! At last I am able to get back on here. I have been unable to access my blog on my laptop because of a stupid mistake I made.

One of my jobs at school is to make the children's roleplay areas. As Christmas was coming I made a lovely Christmas roleplay area. I painted a fireplace with mantlepiece and stockings, bought santa hats with beards and tinsel for decoration. I thought it would be a good idea also to print labels such as - gift, parcel, stocking, workshop ... you get the idea?

The best site for such labels is one that has been used for many years by schools. The resources are free and look great. However we are no longer allowed to use them at school as it turns out that the owner of the site has been jailed for being a paedophile. Horrible, I know. But staff still use the resources at times because they are so good and foolishly I thought it would do no harm to print some for my roleplay. I just wanted it to look lovely ...

To get the resources, however, there was a proviso ... I had to download the site toolbar. Easy, I thought. Download it, get the resources, uninstall the toolbar.

IDIOT!!! IDIOT!!!! IDIOT!!!!!

Now I cannot remove the toolbar and reading about it online it is obviously bad news for my laptop. I don't know what to do. I will have to ask around and see if my more pc literate friends can help.

In the meantime, if you are reading this and are ever tempted to install something to get something else?

THINK!!! NOTHING IS FREE!!! DON'T BE AN IDIOT LKE ME!!!

I am not going to mention the name of the site as I don't want to send any traffic its way, but please, do be careful before you download or install anything.They may not be what they appear to be.

6 comments:

joy said...

Thanks for the warning. There is so much "out there" now, its so difficult to know the good from the bad. Hope you are able to find someone to sort it for you xx

Jackie said...

There is another website,(you don't have to download the toolbar, it has lots of similar things. It's called Twinkl. Easy to download from but not quite as easy to navigate as the other one. Jackie x

Urban Cynic said...

No, never done anything like that cos I know what would happen! If in doubt never do it!

These links might help:

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/remove-toolbar-has-taken-over-your-firefox-search

http://support.google.com/toolbar/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=9231
Good luck with that. x

sarah at secret housewife said...

Thank you Joy, Jackie and White Space. I have managed to get rid of it and have learnt a lesson. I am usually so careful, but this time got burnt. I will be even more careful in future.
Sarah
x

Pauline said...

I'm glad your friends helped you get rid of it, Sarah. A similar thing happened to my son's computer after his daughter downloaded something. Thankfully I learnt from their experience.

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