"CENET"

I am going to rant about CNET today and will post the last of the media essay tomorrow. I have a few good computer programs that I have downloaded from CNET, that I use constantly. I usually check to see how often they have been downloaded and what kind of rating they get from the editors. Yet I spent hours this weekend getting rid of a funmoods toolbar that came with a program to update drivers. I removed it from the programs and yet there it still was. I googled it and found everyone ranting about it and about the quality of CNET downloads. Based on the advice of the ranters I looked in the Firefox add-ons and cleared off most of the toolbars. It was still there. Finally I had to download another CNET hosted program malwarebytes which removed it from the registry and I downloaded new copies of firefox and internet explorer. The final task I needed to do was to reset firefox. CNET seems to have turned into "CENET" or "caveat emptor NET". Programs that are rated highly by editors turn out to be duds. If you don't pay close attention when you are agreeing to download a program you end up with another unnecessary toolbar. In one case I had to uncheck the box in the agreement to find the clean download agreement. Many outraged people said that they had not downloaded funmoods but I think I briefly saw an agreement box for it when I was hurrying through a download. I've been looking for a way to update drivers for years, now I wonder if it is not all a scam. I downloaded a driver update program which allowed a certain amount of drivers to be updated and then 2 daily. When I downloaded the quota the program told me it thought that they were all the same. When I tried to update the drivers manually that the program said were in critical danger, my computer could not find any software more current than what I had. Many of the CNET programs are not "free" at all. They do a scan and tell you everything is critical, but when you try to fix what is critical you have to register and pay. Caveat Emptor NET.