How Do I Uninstall an Annoying Toolbar

Toolbars are one of the most annoying parts of using a computer. They come in all shapes and sizes and stick to the top of your Internet explorer, making your screen seem smaller and your system seem slower. To add insult to injury, many toolbars are actually "SCAMWARE", meaning they install themselves on your computer without you even knowing... making their removal extremely important. Here's how to uninstall a toolbar from your system.

Despite being attached to Internet Explorer or FireFox, toolbars are actually their own program packages, which means that you can uninstall them in much the same way you uninstall most other programs. To do this, you simply need to use the program's "uninstall feature" which will remove all the files and "links" the program has on your computer. To see if the toolbar has this feature, open START > CONTROL PANEL > ADD / REMOVE PROGRAMS, then find the toolbar's name and click "uninstall" next to it.

This will do two things to remove the software from your PC. It will first remove the program files that the program has on your computer and will then remove the registry keys that it has embedded inside the registry. This means that when you use one of these uninstall features, they are juts automatically performing a two-step ritual to remove the software from your PC. This means that if the uninstall feature does not work, or is not present, you will need to do this method yourself in order to get the toolbar off your system.

To manually remove all traces of these toolbars from your computer, you first need to go into "My Computer" and then browse to C:/Program Files/. This will bring up the name of the toolbar and all the program files it has, meaning that you can select these files and delete them all from your PC, by pressing SHIFT + DELETE. Program files are the files which allow the toolbar to function, meaning that if you remove them, it will not be able to work.

The next thing you need to do is remove the "links" the toolbar has with Windows and your programs. These links are in the form of registry keys and tell your computer all sorts of information, from how to load up the toolbar to what to do with it. These "links" are very important, and you need to remove them from your PC to completely uninstall your toolbar. To do this, just head to C:/Windows and open REGEDIT.EXE. This will bring up the registry editor, which you then just need to press CTRL + F inside, to search for the toolbar's name. Then you just need to delete all the keys the editor finds, effectively making your computer "forget" about it.

Although this is an effective way to uninstall programs, it's very risky, especially for someone who hasn't done it before. Messing with the registry can severely damage your computer, which is why you might want to consider using an uninstaller program to get rid of it. These programs work very well to remove all the files and registry entries for a program, allowing you to get rid of them once and for all. We've found the best uninstaller tool for this job, is an application called Wizard Uninstaller