My son recently bought a new Gateway computer that unfortunately had Vista installed on it. I tried to upgrade his computer to Windows XP but there weren’t any XP drivers that worked with his new integrated Sound and Network cards. By the way, I am using the word, upgrade, here on purpose and it is not a typo. 
He bought the computer from Circuit City and they preinstalled an online automated PC Data Storage software called,”Sparebackup”, found on this site: Sparebackup
. You are probably wondering how I came to the conclusion that it was Circuit City and not Gateway which installed the software, well the following site hints that this may be the case: Tech Support Agreement site .
This software was configured to automatically start up during every boot. It would open up MS Explorer 7 once a day regardless of whether you were using it and display a popup advertisement reminding you that, “your Hard Drive will fail and urging you to use their service”. It did not matter that my son had the popup blocker activated, as it would bypass the blocker. I suggested that my son deactivate Java in his Windows Explorer 7 options and even this did not stop the problem. Needless to say, this was very annoying.
My son asked me for help. Usually, the first thing I do before offering anyone help is to Google the problem. This is how I came up with the possible Java solution which unfortunately did not work. However, the following sites looked promising:
Sparebackup Online Storage Site
All three sites gave exactly the same solution however what they failed to mention is that you cannot uninstall a program that is running and this specific software is pre-configured to not let you quit the program. When you followed the instructions on the first and second site, a Windows message would appear informing you of this and stated that the programs will automatically be terminated by Windows. However, apparently this software was written to also bypass this Window’s feature.
I would then try to manually quit the program by right clicking on it from the Windows Vista Taskbar and left clicking on the EXIT button that appeared but it would not stop running. Here is a picture of the Window’s Vista Taskbar:
So after a few tries at uninstalling the program using the instructions provided and failing to achieve my goal, I decided to take a new approach.
I started the computer in safe mode and followed the instructions which again did not work. I then remembered my old friend, “MSCONFIG”, from Windows XP. I did not know whether it was still available in Windows Vista so I tested my idea by using the run command and typing in the program name. To my surprise, the program is still there and came right up. This is a picture of what it looks like:
I clicked on the STARTUP tab and found that this program was listed. I clicked on the little square to the left of it to get rid of the check mark and then clicked on the APPLY and OK buttons. Next I re-started the computer. I was now able to follow the instructions on how to remove it shown on the first and second site listed above.The problem is now resolved.
Another possible solution to end this program that I did not try was pressing the CTRL + ALT + DEL key combination which would bring up this dialog box:
Now click on,”START TASK MANAGER”, it will appear and looks like this
You would then click on the PROCESSES tab and find the name of the process you want to terminate. Select it and click on the END PROCESS button on the bottom of this window.
As I previously stated, I did not try this solution. This is because a lot of times, the name of the process does not match the name of the program that you are trying to terminate. Hence, if the name is different, you would not know which process to terminate. Also, sometimes there is more then one process that the program is running and if you do not terminate all of them, the program may still run.
I really hope this helps someone. Shame of these sites for not informing people how to properly uninstall this program. Shame also on the Sparebackup company for employing coercive marketing techniques.