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Tip-Of-The-Week

November 24, 2006

From the Free Computer Consultant

http://www.FreeComputerConsultant.com

What is my computer doing?

First a note to say that I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and is enjoying the leftovers!

* * * * * * * *

Two of the oft heard complaints I get are:
"My PC is soooo slooooww"
and
"I think it's infected"

Either of these strike a chord with you? Turn your machine on and wait, wait, wait. What IS it doing?

How can you tell what's going on? Well, many users have resorted to the task manager to try and find out what is going on at any particular time and to see if malware might be running. And task manager does work. The problem is that many of the processes running are simply too hard to determine if they are valid.

This week I wanted to make sure that those of you who are a little more advanced knew about another great FREE (for personal use) utility that blows away task manager and combines msconfig functionality and more as well.

"What's Running" 2.2 is great for these purposes and then some. Those who are faint of heart may not be interested, but if you want to pop the hood on your Windows, this is a great way to do it.

Besides just telling you what's running, it also gives you more clues to whether it should be running. Information like ports and resources used better let you determine if something is a valid process or malware.

Now if your PC is infected, this is a great tool to try and find out what's on it and gobbling horsepower. Interestingly enough, there is an install option for What's Running that is "compact" - especially designed to fit on a flash drive. That's a handy feature to take this tool to another computer.

The Startup tab is very similar to MSConfig. It tells you what programs are fired off every time you boot Windows; another key in finding and eliminating malware.

So if you're up for some advance tinkering, download a copy and give it a try. REMEMBER! - Always backup your system first before tinkering!

Hope this information is of use to you, that's it for this week.

Thanks for subscribing,

the FreeComputerConsultant

http://www.FreeComputerConsultant.com

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