Cleaning up Windows
Submitted by 
Rob on 3:16am, Thursday, 2004-05-06
Rob on 3:16am, Thursday, 2004-05-06
Here are some quick pointers on cleaning up that spyware and other junk running on your computer that you really didn't ask for. Try running [url=http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=home]Spybot Search & Destroy[/url] to find all those nasty little pieces of spyware that are wasting your computer resources to track your surfing for somebody else's business. Another popular tool that's a little more user-friendly but a little less aggressive (in my opinion) is [url=http://www.lavasoft.de/]LavaSoft AdAware[/url]. Both of these can be used for free by an individual, but Spybot accepts donations and AdAware has both a free and a paid version.
Once you've rid yourself of those, you can look at the tasks you still have running by pressing ctrl-alt-delete. This will show you all the processes that are running on your coputer. There's a list maintained at [url=http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm]Answers that Work[/url]. This list will help you figure out what processes are running, and if you want them running.
At 2:59pm, Friday, 2004-05-07, Rob said:
Rob said:
If I saw those two processes, I wouldn't suspect anything. If they're infected, then a virus scanner should see it when they're running. That's the same as for any infected file. Saying they could be a virus is the same as saying that excel.exe could be a virus. It's true, but the only way to tell is to track down the executable and run a virus scanner on it.
If you want to look it up still, task manager on its own can't tell you what the path is for the processes. You can do a search for files with that name, though. If you see any that aren't in your windows folder or a subdirectory, then you would focus on those. The only other catch is that the process name isn't [i]always[/i] the same as the name of the file on disk. Then there's no search tool that comes with Windows that will find it.
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