PapaJohn's Newsletter #34 - Jan 1, 2005
Movie
Maker 2 and Photo Story
New Year's
Resolutions
Manage Adware
and Spyware
Understand DLL
Registration
To start the new year on a positive note, how about
learning a bit more about what's on your computer competing for its energies and
your attention?
There are many posts by those who say they
resolved Movie Maker issues by cleaning up adware and spyware.
Maybe they did.
And there are more and more people with computers bogging down
with adware and spyware, to the point they can no longer run the apps they used
to, or can't run them as well.
Let's explore that a bit... along with a possibly related item,
the registration of Movie Maker DLLs.
... before getting into
them, a couple notes about things
going on...
Notes
• It's been kind of quiet for the holidays... I'm waiting
for a few people to get back to work next week or so... to take the next steps
on a few co-operative projects.
That
gives me some time to work on my current video-related priority, writing
the chapter for the new book about the world of Virtual
Dub.
Adware and
Spyware
Adware and spyware have become more of an issue than computer
viruses for many people... certainly more prevalent... and just as serious in
terms of performance issues.
Here's a 6 step process to remove the adware/spyware on
your computer, using free utilities in addition to the usual virus protection
software. The steps that should be done in sequence.
1 - Ad-aware
install it... the default location is C:\Program
Files\Lavasoft\Ad-aware 6
When starting it, have it check for updates (link in the
lower-right). It's like a virus protection app, needing the
most current list of what's out there, a list
it calls the reference file.
Then 'Scan now', going with the default to perform a
smart in-depth system-scan. I just ran it on my laptop and checked its log. It
reported:
• 42
running processes (the Task Manager is reporting 51). Ad-aware
provides more info than Task Manager does about each, including
the path to the file. The figure below includes a sample line item
from the Ad-aware log.
• 31 tracking cookies... many of which I know about and want to
keep. Ad-aware lets you choose which ones to keep or
quarantine.
Do a right mouse click and choose 'Select all objects'
to quickly put check marks in all of them. Then let
it quarantine whatever it finds, sometimes hundreds of
items. Or review them individually and decide which to quarantine. If you
do them all and later miss something, you can take it out of
quarantine. I left the 31 tracking cookies it reported and quarantined nothing
on this
pass.
Desktop check - My laptop recently came back from
the shop with a new hard drive, so it hasn't had a chance to accumulate as much
adware and spyware as my desktop... running it now on my desktop shows 230 new
objects (68 registry keys, 5 registry values, 156 files and 1 folder). I let
Ad-aware quarantine them all, then repeated the scan to see if anything came
back automatically... nothing
did.
2 - Spybot Search and Destroy
Install it... the default location is C:\Program
Files\Spybot - Search & Destroy
Similar to Ad-aware, update it's reference file first by
clicking on Search for Updates.
Then select 'Check for problems'. Spybot takes a
good bit longer to run then Ad-aware.
Here's what it reported on my
laptop.
