Speakeasy forum: My lovely HP laptop which has performed flawlessly

computer help moderators here. Standard advice when lured to these sites is to run away fast. Hopefully you have the or made the recovery disks. If not, the advice is to contact the manufacturer and get them. They are (supposedly) available at reasonable cost.

the system restore function. You didn't mention the OS but it would be XP or Win7 most likely. Personally, I'd ditch Norton. It's a well known resource hog. I don't know that particular product but once used a number of their utilities until I discovered how invasive and tenacious they were and how much drain they placed on my system. Norton woes are well discussed in the help forums and some folks are as passionate with their software utility opinions as are some here with their politics.

at restoration of old settings and deletion of newly installed stuff I looked among the small icons for Internet Eraser which I use periodically mostly to delete contents of the Deleted Items pail.

It wasn't there.

I looked through the contents of my hard drive and couldn't find it (I was a bit cross-eyed by this time) so I went to Downloads.com to reacquire it. Upon clicking installation it said there was a file labelled for it and should I download it there. I did, and then cleaned the system, and gloriously everything returned to normal. Icons the right size Fonts the right size, and all my Bookmarks restored. (I didn't mention this, but they appeared to have all been deleted)

Now there doesn't appear to me to be any straight line correlation between a hidden app I've used for years and its restoration and the solving of all other problems, but that's the way it has worked out.

I have since gone through the Add Delete Programs settings and deleted everything dated yesterday. I did have a restore point set, but that was going to be my next action.

Anyway, all is well in the land of HP Pavillion 7 running Windows 7.

Thanks for your patience while I whined.
Rob