Which things annoy you about your laptop or desktop PC?

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I can't get rFactor to run on it.

I can't find it hiding in add-ons, or any list of active programs I have tried to block it using permissions on Firefox. So is it on the browser? It comes and goes, it doesn't routinely start up every time I start my computer, only sometimes.

My computer knowledge is primitive, I don't know what Cortana actually is or how to look there, thanks for the offer of help TD - I am too computer dumb to figure it out.

I only have Win10 on an experimental computer but it's almost a special interest of mine to remove and block annoying things in Windows and on the web generally.

When you say Bing starts up (sometimes) when you start your computer, do you mean Firefox auto-starts and Bing is there as your home page, or does Bing show itself in some other way?

Cortana is a virtual assistant (whatever that is) that uses Bing. It's hard to describe because Microsoft keep changing it. It used to be part of the Windows search bar but I gather they took it out again and made it part of their Edge browser. So it might depend on how old your Windows is and whether or not Microsoft has updated it.

If you press the Windows key and the R key together, a box should come up. Typing "winver" into that box should reveal the version of Windows you have. If Microsoft have been updating it, you'll probably find it's version 2004. I gather mine is 1903 or something, because I've been deliberately resisting the updates. It'll probably be useful to know your version number because the fix to get rid of Bing might be different for different versions.

Re. B19's query.

Here's something I noticed when playing around with CCleaner on an old Dell Inspiron that still has Windows 7 on it:





There are two references to Bing here, and options to disable or delete them. They're under the Internet Explorer section (a browser I've never used on this machine), and if you're using Windows 10 you'd need to look under 'Edge', even if you use Firefox. The Bing features are already disabled on my version of Internet Explorer, by the way.

It's a pretty long shot. I suspect Microsoft would make it a lot harder than this to get rid of Bing in Windows 10, but you've nothing to lose by looking into it.


EDIT: Well, just looked at CCleaner's analysis of my main laptop (running Windows 8.1), and Bing shows up there under Firefox for some reason (never seen any evidence of it in actual use). It doesn't show up in Firefox's own list of installed extensions, though it is available on the browser. So maybe worth checking under Firefox as well as Edge on the 'Browser Plugins' section.

^ Thanks for the info, I've heard a fair bit of stuff to that effect myself. To be honest, I'm not all that bothered if people like this know what OS I have, where I live or what websites I look at. For any tasks that I feel require more privacy, I use Linux distros, including ones like Kodachi. I have to say that CCleaner has some very useful features and works really well - I'm prepared to accept the downsides in return for the convenience in this case. I also use Recuva and Speccy, which I believe are provided by the same company which owns CCleaner.

Personally if I were looking for a way of removing Bing from a computer of mine, I would only install CCleaner as a last resort if simpler and safer methods had all failed. Otherwise the risk is that it would end up doing more harm than good. I think it might be wise to await information from B19 about which version of Windows 10 it is and where Bing is cropping up, before attempting to apply a solution. I do know that I seem to have somehow got rid of Bing from my Win10 machine without installing anything that has that level of "danger" associated with it, so there apparently is a safer way, at least for older versions of 10.

It seems that some incarnations of CCleaner are better than others, and that they range from perfectly fine to horrible.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/stop-usin ... r-windows/