What everyone should (and may already) know about RoadRunner

[Samiam]

I just subscribed to Road Runner, and shortly after the installation I noticed my resources dropped from 92% prior to the installation to 71%. My computer had symptoms of a virus or some other malady (very sluggish, lockups, etc), but Mr. Norton or Trend Micro failed to find anything. In desperation, I uninstalled the Road Runner software (called Broad Jump in Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel--also their diagnostic software called Medic) and the weird behaviour of my system went away. Just out of curiosity, I tried to access the internet and my email, and everything still works normally. I don't know if this is an advisable thing to do, but it has certainly improved my broadband experience. I post this here simply for the benefit of anyone else who is having the same problem.

Have I stepped in something by removing Road Runner's software?

[BadChicken]

I was told by a tech with RoadRunner not to install there Medic program. Hogs up a lot of memory.

Thanks for your info.

[Spider]

High speed modems do not require software to function.
BroadJump comes with quite a few service providers. At
Slashdot there is miles of threads with complaints about
BroadJump.

From what I've read about BroadJump it's no different than
spyware. I would be a little worried that ISPs feel they can
take money from you and inject spyware on every customer.

The turn some aspects of the Internet evolution has taken
since the dot-bomb has been getting uglier as time goes on.
The military and education institutions built it, computer geeks
took it to the next level, and once the ad-men saw how many
eyes were on the Web and realized it's potential then all it
took was something like the dot-bomb for the ad-men to get
in deep.

Today spyware killers are an absolute must-have. It's pretty
sad when one ponders where we will be and what we will have
to deal with in the next years coming.

The recent post tomstonsils59 made about a new
level of spyware (http://www.cybertechhelp.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11733) effecting machines is a little
taste of the future I think. It's designed so that if removed
it disables your internet connection from within WindowsXX
itself. Obviously the perpetrators are hoping an infected user
will come to the conclusion that their Internet ceased after
uninstalling the spyware therefore reinstalling the spyware
just to get the Internet back.

Call a spade a spade, it's digital blackmail. The scary part is
what is BroadJump going to do once they find out 50% of
their infected customers are doing what you are doing
Samiam? They'll pay some poor programmer to insert the
digital blackmail into BroadJump and then we here at
Cyber Tech Help will have to create a new forum just for
spyware issues. Sad

[Samiam]

I couldn't agree more concerning the spyware problem.

At the present, AdAware is the only spyware removal tool I have installed. Can you suggest any others? tia

[Spider]

Originally posted by Samiam
Can you suggest any others?
Spybot S&D (http://security.kolla.de/) is probably the best one now. It's definitely
not for the novice computer user.

[Samiam]

You're right about it not being for the novice (me). If you let it run wild and get rid of everything it finds, you're sure to have problems (imho).

Thanks for the reply.

[Spider]

Your Welcome.

Ad-aware will be fine. No worries about using that for spyware
removal.