Based on yesterday's exciting installation of the AIMSPAMLAXO client I have decided that for the next 30 days I am going to delete an application a day that is on my laptop. In some cases I will be deleting applications that I just don't use any more and in other cases I will be deleting things I never asked for that were payloaded through some other mechanism.
Since AIM is fresh I thought I would start there. What secret goodies came with yesterday's install? Well Plaxo wasn't installed so I am guessing that it is actually embedded in the AIM client or it has hooks to Plaxo through some APIs. Thanks for not cluttering up the hard drive. I did however get a new goodie called Viewpoint. Do a Google search on Viewpoint. By doing this I saw what appears to be a new Google feature. They cluster the direct results for Viewpoint and they insert a series of results for Viewpoint Spyware. Cool feature. It reminds me of Clusty.
If you click on the spyware link you find links to things like, Is it Spyware? Why is it on my computer? How do I remove it? I have to agree. Yesterday I had a firewall request for Viewpoint and mistakenly thought it was my mouse pointer. Today I know better. Rather than find out what Viewpoint is, I think I am going to delete it. So today's piece of software is Viewpoint. But let's make sure we take care of everything. Starting with my program list I see that I have not one but two entries for Viewpoint. Naughty, naughty. There is the Viewpoint Manager and the Viewpoint Media Player. Must delete both. I search through my browser and look for the various domains with cookies. No Viewpoint. Ok, good. I feel like it's going to a be good 30 days of improving the performance of my machine and becoming more aware of what people are doing with my Attention without my specific knowledge.
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