Not at all. I have long experience with all of those programs and their
companies and over the years they have all dropped off my shopping
list for the usual reasons like excessive bloat and increasing bug rates.

Most of those have also occasionally shown up as the cause of various
problems with networking and media software on all the tech support
sites and forums I've been to in the past decade or so. My blacklist is
bigger because I've been building it longer and I don't drop any that fall
to code bloat because that group never really come back from there.

If you are afraid of my HOSTS file you can use any of the others out
there, most of which are updated more frequently. I just provide it to
protect myself and friends from bad sites and don't really do much to it
except add to it once in awhile and sort it. All it does is block known
spam, scam and phishing sites I hear about on various security sites or
catch spamming any of my forums.

If you are having any problems carrying a large list on your system the
usual cause is the Windows service called "DNS Client". Since few
people need that one try disabling it and test to see if any of the
computers in your LAN have any problems with DNS lookups. If your
computer is alone then you don't need that service at all.

afraid?

you forget (not surprising) that I tried it once...and to my discredit it took me a damn week to figure out that it was responsible for sucking my box's resources like a vampire sucking the life out a victim...and I do mean sucking the life away...and in case you haven't paid attention (which I'm sure you haven't) I have a P4 Oc'd to 3.05 GHz and 2 Gb of ram, which is a fairly powerful setup for the rather clean system I run...after finally noticing that one particular process was sucking 95% of cpu and making a spiraling out of control use of memory, I was at least able to kill the process...took me 5 more days to remember I had installed that piece of cr@p, and upon removal from my system things were back to normal...

I guess you can use the word 'afraid' as I'm rather afraid of just about anything you recommend...

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So Long and Thanks for All the Files
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