I have been caught in the past holding the third party program bag so to say, maybe I was downloading in a hurry or had multiple things going at once and someone knocked at the door. And then...a call to Tim (he loves those calls) in order to help me clean up the mess I allowed into my machine.



Whatever the reason, it happens to the best of us from time to time. We are lucky because as we test things here at MajorGeeks we do it within a VMware Workstation; (Tim made sure that I had it years ago so I would stop calling him) rendering any of these unneeded additional toolbars, homapage changes and third party programs inert as soon as we hop out of the virtual machine. For those that do not use a virtual workstation there is Unchecky; this handy little program aims to keep potentially unwanted programs out of your computer. Saving you hours of frustration trying to remove devilishly crafted crapware hidden in the nooks and crannies of your machine - no fun.



Unchecky takes some of the pressure off the user during the download by actively checking for unrelated offers, such as PUPs (potentially unwanted programs), offers to change your homepage or your search engine. With Unchecky, these offers become opt-in instead of opt-out, i.e. they will be installed only if you explicitly choose you want them (you usually don’t). If for whatever reason, you happen to accidentally accept one these, Unchecky will promptly warn you allowing you not to make a potentially timely mistake.

Unchecky should not be considered a universal solution and you should continue to be vigilant when downloading files, but it is definitely a nice fail-safe to have in place.

Download @ http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/unchecky_beta.html