The other day a client’s Internet Explorer 7 was stuck on the runonce page. She couldn’t get rid of it.

There’s a simple program on Cnet’s download.com that removed it right away. It’s called IE7 Runonce Remover. Click below to download the program.

http://download.cnet.com/IE7-Runonce-Remover/3000-8022_4-10683012.html

To uninstall Norton or any software, usually you can go to Start > Control Panel> Add and Remove Programs. (This means go to the Start button, then to the Control Panel, then to Add and Remove Programs.) On Vista go to Start>Control Panel>Programs. Sometimes it takes awhile for a list of installed software to appear on your screen, but when it does, you can pick the program you want to uninstall. Often you’ll need to restart the computer to completely remove the unwanted program. Most legitimate programs will uninstall this way.

But if that doesn’t work and you are still having difficulty uninstalling Norton Antivirus or any of its products, you can go here and download the Norton Uninstall tool. Ms. Ducktoes has done this hundreds of times and it works well.

I’ve had to uninstall Mcafee Anti-virus products several times in the last week or so. People have let their licenses expire but that doesn’t keep the the anti-virus from running in the background and using up tons of resources. And when I try to remove it the usual way, by going to Start>Control Panel>Add and Remove Programs, it won’t uninstall. One older laptop computer I fixed in the last week had both expired Mcafee and Norton running, neither of which would uninstall. The poor computer was quite beleagured. And running very sloooo-ow.

So what I did was to go to the Mcafee site and search for their uninstall program. It works quite nicely, thank you very much.

Here it is http://service.mcafee.com/FAQDocument.aspx?id=TS100507

Follow Step 2, if you’ve tried Step 1 already.

This week I fixed a computer that booted through the Welcome screen and the login screen to a totally black screen with only the white cursor and nothing else. The poor cursor was in total darkness! I tried booting into Safe Mode and Last Good Configuration (that worked) and still the cursor stood alone. Heigh-ho the dairy-o, the cursor stood alone.

So I took out the hard drive and attached it to my own computer using this process. It’s not hard. All you need is another computer. And I ran checkdisk and defragmented the drive. Also I ran Malwarebytes and AVG on it.

After this I put the hard drive back in its own case and it booted up all the way through to the desktop. Yay!!!

But it took 3 minutes and 30 seconds to boot. Too slow. So I ran Malwarebytes and AVG again and did all my usual tricks to speed up the computer. When I was finished it booted in 40 seconds. Not bad, huh?
And the cursor stood on the restful TeleTubbies-like rolling green hill landscape of the default Windows XP wallpaper which, according to Wikipedia, was taken near Sonoma, California.

You can also check out How to Fix the Black Screen with White Cursor, Part Two.

I look forward to your comments.