Muristek
Q. I have Norton 360, Malwarebytes Premium, Dell Support Assist and System Mechanic via a 30 day trial subscription thru AOL installed on my desktop. My question is whether or not having System Mechanic installed is necessary with everything else? The most attractive feature to me is the registry cleaning it performs. But, will everything run just fine without it?
A. Dell Support Assist is a great application for Dell computers and helps keep them up to date in terms of drivers and other updates. Norton 360 and Malwarebytes are a good combo of applications for fighting malware and viruses so I would keep those.
The System Mechanic software is probably something you could get rid of, especially since it's not going to be free once the evaluation period expires.
Generally, I am not a believer in registry cleaners, but if you feel like this kind of software adds a benefit to your computing experience I would suggest CCleaner from ccleaner.com. They offer free and paid versions of the application and the free version is as good a registry cleaner as any of the paid applications on the market.
Q. My wife was looking at articles on the MSN Web site when all of a sudden the screen turned blue and we had a message with a blaring horn that our computer was infected and to call Microsoft immediately. We couldn’t close the window so I shut the computer down, restarted and ran a full AVG and Malwarebytes scan and nothing turned up. I thought we were good but it happened to me today when I opened Edge from the task bar. I’m sure this is malware of some kind but I can't find it. Any suggestions?
A. This is probably not a virus or malware in the technical sense. What has likely happened is that some kind of add-on or plugin was...