TOOLBARS

Are Toolbars the tail wagging your dog? I see them on PCs everywhere. Google Toolbar. Yahoo! Toolbar. Bing Toolbar. AOL Toolbar. MSN Toolbar. And a zillion others. Are they really worth it?!

I saw a PC the other day that had so many Toolbars loaded that there was little room left to display the website. In another case, the Toolbars were so busy spying on what the user was browsing that websites slowed to a crawl – or would not load at all. In yet another case, the memory bite these toolbars were using pushed the PC over the edge of its limited RAM.

The bottom line is that “Free” Toolbars are not really free. They exact a price in terms of screen real estate, memory usage, bandwidth, and loss of privacy. If you are one of the numerous individuals with several Toolbars installed, you may want to reconsider your choices. Toolbars can often be uninstalled from the [Add/Remove] Programs function in the Control Panel. You can also usually disable them in your browser, although the steps to do this will vary depending on which browser you are using. In my browser, there is a ‘Manage Add-ons’ option under the Tools menu that lets you see and control what Toolbars are installed.