Hi Jacob,
Thank you very much for taking the time to respond and for that good advice.
I have only had this laptop a few weeks and I am wondering if it might 
be neccessary to do a factory reset and start over, this time being a 
bit more careful when I download.
I was was installing independent programs like thunderbird, firefox etc 
so I don't have to do everything via a microsoft account. My next step 
was to look for a free photo and music program that I could access from 
the desktop. I just did not like having to do everything via a microsoft 
account - maybe I am just a bit paranoid!
Thanks again,
Regards,
John.

On 10/03/2014 04:18, Jacob Smith wrote:
> Yes you are. Cnet was a fairly good site, but has degraded a lot. I'm guessing that you didn't properly avoid the sneaky toolbar and home setting checkboxes of the cnet installer. You can change your homepage and remove the toolbar, but if your browser opens by its self, you need the help of an antivirus. If it had malicious software, uninstalling the original software does nothing for you. Simply running the software is enough. Any software you run should be fairly reputable from a trustworthy source. A hint: open-source software is nearly always safe if downloaded from a good site (it's not hard to figure out why). Always check the web address that you are actually using. If it says download.microsoft.com, it's probably good, but watch for thing like d0wnload.microsoft.com.
>
> Sincerely,
> Jacob Smith
> "I wanted to install the traditional card games and after googling this I started to download a file from, (I think c net site), but aborted this when I realised there seemed to be some questionable stuff."
>            PSOFT maintains hundreds of useful files for download
>                       visit our download web page at:
>                  http://freepctech.com/index.php/downloads


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