Saturday, March 18, 2006

Keepin' it clean.

Keepin' it clean. (The computer that is.)

Windows XP automatically creates a restore point from time to time so that if you ever get in trouble you can always return to the "good ole days," say yesterday, when your system worked properly.

I like to go into system tools and create my own restore point whenever I have made major overhauls in the system. When you create your own you can attach a little message like "erased a lot of old files, defragged, ran anti-virus," etc. When you save the restore point xp automatically gives it a time and date stamp. This has saved my biscuits a couple of times.

Boy you just can't have enough tools. After gaining some hard drive space by erasing a bunch of junk, I then ran "AdAware," no problems, then ran "TrojanHunter," no problems, "AVG anti-virus" runs automatically every day, no problems.

Then I ran "SpyBot Search and Destroy," guess what? It found 12 occurances of nuiscance spyware. Actually there were mutiple occurances of a couple of them but they were; advertising.com, AvenueA Inc, Bfast, DoubleClick, FastClick and MediaPlex. I have no idea what any of these do and they are probably not critical but I do NOT want the damned things on my computer!

Anyway, I removed them, and will live to fight another day.

Clean your machine, backup your data, defrag, create a restore point, life is good.

1 comment:

Jason Presley said...

Those that Spybot found are the 6 or 7 most prevelant banner ad and advertising companies online. If you use the web at all, you'll get these. In most cases, you can go to their website and find instructions for altering their cookie file to opt out of their tracking, but it's not really worth the effort.

You could block them altogether with your browser, but then you run the risk of certain page graphics not loading or possibly even not being able to visit certain pages.