ItsGeekToMe.co

Q: I was wondering if you have archived your articles somewhere.  I troubleshoot and repair computers and your articles would be very helpful. 

– Ken J.
Fort Walton Beach, Fla

A: Sure Ken.  The column’s home newspaper, the Northwest Florida Daily News maintains a complete archive of every column ever published, available on the free-access side of their website at [redacted – link is no longer active].  Near the bottom of that page, you’ll see a link that says “‘It’s Geek to Me’ Archives”, which will take you to a page where you can access the back-issues 25 at a time.  In case you’re wondering, this is the 152^nd issue of It’s Geek To Me, and I will celebrate the column’s third anniversary on July 25^th.

Q: How do I make the McAfee Pop-Up “www.siteadvisor.com” go away and not come back when I attempt to use Google Search or open some sites in Firefox. I can’t find any way to shut it down when it appears. I have had the free McAfee security tools that Cox provides installed for some time but this just started. It doesn’t seem to happen in IE. 

– Bill I.
Fort Walton Beach, Fla

A: For those not in the know, McAfee SiteAdvisor is a browser add-on that links to a vast database maintained by McAfee, to provide content ratings and reports on the safety of websites.  While it does offer some level of protection – particularly when you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer – it is not infallible by any means, and as you seem to have discovered, Bill, it can be a little intrusive into your browsing habits.  However, the screenshot you sent me was not a pop-up, but rather a picture of the SiteAdvisor website loaded into a tab in your Firefox browser.  Did that site somehow get added to the list of sites that open you’re your home page loads?  I did not see the SiteAdvisor toolbar in the browser, so either you have hidden it, or it’s not actually running.  Assuming it is running, adjust your toolbars to make it visible.  Then, you should be able to disable it by simply clicking the dropdown arrow on the Site Advisor toolbar and selecting “General Settings…” from the menu.  Uncheck both “Show site ratings with search results” and “Highlight search results” and click “OK”.  If you want to completely uninstall SiteAdvisor, you can try going to the Control Panel’s Add/Remove program’s applet.  If SiteAdvisor doesn’t have its own uninstaller, run the one for McAfee Security Center, and check SiteAdvisor, along with anything else that appears there that you want to remove.  Alternatively, in Firefox you can try going to Tools->Add-Ons, and on the Extensions tab scroll down to McAfee SiteAdvisor.  Click to select it, then click Uninstall.  You’ll have to restart Firefox.  You may have read in previous columns where I’ve said that McAfee software is often notoriously hard to remove.   This can be a perfect example.  I have read reports of SiteAdvisor continuing to reinstall itself in the browser even after being removed this way multiple times.  If you begin to have that experience, it may be time to choose an alternate tool, because from my perspective, anything that fights that hard to say active when you are trying to remove it is probably not good for your system.