Computer Tip of the Week: Speeding up your computer for free

[cwhite2]

I have used AVG for 3 years now & I will NEVER have any of the Norton or Mcaffee resource hogs again.

In addition to the ones you guys mentioned here are a couple more good spyware/adware programs that have great free versions

Spybot Search & Destroy: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html

and AdAware by Lavasoft: http://www.lavasoft.com/

[Dominic J. Maricic]

Those are both great programs too. But if you install them don't let them run all the time. Only run them manually. You don't want 3 spyware programs running at all times or your comptuer will be as bad off as if it was running one of the hogs.

[Bob Elliott]

HEH HEH.
Hey Dom thanks for the tips.
If you do not mind much I would like to add that when running ad aware you have got to be careful as unlike the spybot program, you delete spyware manuely and can sometimes delete things which you want such as cookies.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
I always recomend spy bot and ad aware to comcast customers.
By the way thanks for the msconfig tip as it helped me last month, however I find that sometimes it does not load for internet radio, and is replaced by windows media player, which I do not want.Hmmmm maybe I need to go back and allow Real Player on startup?

[David P. Valley]

Dominic,

I always knew about the MSCONFIG, but how do we know what the heck some of those files are? They have strange letters and numbers which I have no idea what file they control.

Is there a cheat sheet out there somewhere to figure out what files are what?

[Dominic J. Maricic]

Davind,
Yup, that's what I was mentioning above. Type in the blabla.exe into google and the first few sites that come up are sites that will tell you what ever exe does by it's name. If you still aren't sure, ask here and I'll tell you.

Bob,
No problem. You will need to change the file association. Go into real player there's a place in options to do it, or you can do it by changing the file extension associations, but that's a little more work.

[Mark A. Timpani, CMI]

David, just type it into google . Read through a few of the results though don't just take the first result as gospel.

[David P. Valley]

Originally Posted by mtimpani

David, just type it into google . Read through a few of the results though don't just take the first result as gospel.

Thanks, Guys.

I found it even easier to go to the website...
http://www.neuber.com/taskmanager/pr...hkcmd.exe.html

And then delete the wierd letters before .exe and replace them with any unknown files that I'm curious about. 98% of the time a list of individual comments will tell you more about the file.

In my link above, you remove the letters hkcmd. and add your unknown file name.

It's very easy.....

[Dominic J. Maricic]

Yeah there's a few really good sites out there, I didn't want to list just one as sometimes that site wont have the one name you're looking for.

This method by the way is one of the quickest I use to find viruses and sypware on people's machines when I'm fixing them. You get used to seeing what SHOULD be listed, and what shouldn't.