LOL Glenda........now I understand why you sent me that recipe! LOLOLOLOL!! Bless your heart! I meant the kind of "cookies" that are in our computers, that allow certain sites to enter. Brenda......I'm discovering that no place usually has a cookie with a similar name as the site. That's the problem I'm having. I can get out of everything, and bring up each site I visit, one at a time, and then do a Webroot Spy Sweeper sweep and figure it out slowly that way, but thought I'd ask. Every site seems to have a weird named cookie.

Maybe read the whole article rather than just the mindset gossip of one employee who was probably chastised. You made it clear in the past you are a genuine Norton Fan. Update - 12 October Microsoft has issued the following statement in response to the publication of this article: "We are committed to protecting our customers, and our Microsoft antimalware solutions provide strong, comprehensive defence against malicious code and attacks. We believe in these products and are proud of the protection capabilities we provide to well over 150 million computers worldwide." Here is a link that might be useful: cnnMoney - McAfee ... in Canada This post was edited by mikie on Thu, Jan 9, 14 at 2:58

Randy, Thanks for your reply...really appreciate your taking the time to do that. I do have Firefox set to clear all private data upon closing the browser, and am glad to hear you have confidence that it does so. I have an older version of Window Washer and it does the job on IE, but it doesn't contain the option to add Firefox. I understand that newer versions do. I hadn't heard of CCleaner, but you have me curious now so I may check it out. Thanks again for your help Hal

to answer the question asked, you can expect them to charge you $20 to $40 bucks for a so simple wipe/format. if you want a government level wipe conforming to Department of Defense (DOD Data Cleaning and Sanitizing Standard 5220.22-M) then it might be a little more. that said, you can do both yourself with various free utilities available on the internet. Please note that Active@DiskKill's free version mentioned above IS NOT a government-level DOD-compliant disk wipe. What is the difference ? Well, formatting or simply wiping a hard drive once is only writing over the first letter of the the hard drive contents header file. All the data that was on the hard drive remains, and there are utilities out there to recover data from a formatted or standard wiped hard drive, so you information is not truely gone, it jsut looks like it is gone, and as new files are saved and teh new system is used, the old data is overwritten, but please know unless the whole hard drive is filled, it may never be completely overwritten. Now with government level DOD compliant utilities for data wiping, very complex and time consuming operations are performed to write over the data repeatedly until its not possible to recover any previous data. Here is more information on DOD Data Cleaning and Sanitizing Standard 5220.22-M if you want a long boring read. here are some D0D 5220.22-M compliant free utilities that will do the job for you: Darik's Boot and Nuke (DBAN) (free) BC Wipe (30 day free trial) Eraser (free)