Have a Computer Question ? Read this first.

Another free Anti-Virus app to consider, AntiVir (I use it at home) :

Another free (30 day trial) trojan-hunter, The Cleaner:

http://www.moosoft.com/products/cleaner/download/

While these next items don’t necessarily directly impact the performance of your computer, there are indirect benefits to the overall health and performance of your internet connection. Think of these as suppliments to the items already mentioned.

Free, automated prioritization and reporting of your firewall logs, with feedback:

http://www.mynetwatchman.com/

Free, automated prioritization and reporting of your spam, with feedback:

http://www.spamcop.net/anonsignup.shtml

Free toolbar app protecting IE users from known fraud/phisher sites:

http://www.earthlink.net/home/software/toolbar/

Free toolbar app protecting IE and Firefox users from fraud/phisher sites by decoding obfuscated urls:

http://www.corestreet.com/spoofstick/

When editing your startup programs, it can be difficult to determine which files are necessary, which are optional, and which are downright dangerous. Here is an exhaustive searchable online database of over 4600 startup files and and explanations of what they do and if they can be safely turned off (Y = Necessary for your computer to operate; U = User’s choice, a program that may be useful; N = Not required; X = spyware, virus, or memory hog related, always turn off). This is also available as a stand alone utility which you can download and run locally on your computer. Here is the page with this utility, plus a wealth of information about managing your startup programs.

… and it looks like I’m going to go ahead and buy their 29.95 Firewall as it has served me well this past year. All the other free trial versions only last 30 days at most so it isn’t really worth it to me.

My reason for posting (other than to admit I’m a cheap bastard :D) is to ask how many of y’all have stayed with McAfee after the free trial expired, or did you find something better?

Thanks

Quasi

Quasi,

I too used McAfee - but I have since switched to Norton…just a preference I guess. :slight_smile:

Aquasunset

She’s made it to three posts without someone stealing her nickname! Cool! :smiley:

I used to have Norton Antivirus, but they kept nickel-and-diming me to death with newer versions. I’d just like to buy the Firewall once, get free updates-upgrades for life and be done with it.

Q

I would love that also! After installing Norton…some viruses and unwanted programs were found that McAfee did not…go figure! :smiley:

Aquasunset

Hey I am new doper…give me a chance to become comfortable. :smiley:

A very nice new Doper, if I may say so my dear? :rolleyes:

Quasi gets his old Prussian charm out of closet and dusts it off

Just kiddin’ Y’all. Jeez, I been out of the game so long I don’t even remember the rules anymore! What a :wally

:smack:

Q

Right. So when I start IE I get a pop up to something like xzy123.com. I close it and then get asked if I want to make qsrch.com my start page. I close that and there’s no more trouble for that session.

I have Spybot (and update it) and AdAware (and update it) and use McAfee (and it automatically updates itself). None of them report anything on my system.

Anyone know what this is and how to remove it?

The guy that created CWShredder to fight CoolWebSearch variants of spyware has thrown in the towel. There will be probably be no more updates to CWShredder, due in part to the aggression mutations that have evolved recently.

From his website at SpywareInfo (link deleted)

His has been a heroic effort, and the battle against spyware will become much more difficult for his absence. All of his tools are freeware, supported only by donations. If you have used his tools to exorcise the spyware demons from your computer, drop by his website and thank him, in what ever way seems appropriate. (hint, hint)

Source: Wired news story - July 2, 2004

Source: US CERT Notification

From a purely security standpoint, one should seriously consider no longer using Internet Explorer. From a purely esthetic standpoint, you will be very glad you switched.

Not natively. Windows (and for that matter other PC operating systems such as Linux) can’t execute Macintosh programs and PCs cannot boot any flavor of the MacOS; similarly, the MacOS can’t launch Windows applications and a Macintosh computer will not boot Windows or any other PC operating system.

You can do at least some of this in emulation though. Emulation is where you run a program, and the program duplicates the functions of the logic boards and chips of the other hardware platform and then converts all that stuff to signals that make sense to the real (and different) logic boards and chips that the computer actually has. Inside the emulation program, operating systems that can’t boot natively can boot up, and once they do, programs written for that operating system can run.

Emulated computers are slower than real computers. An instruction is processed a lot faster on a real logic chip that has actual circuits than it is by an emulation program that takes those instructions and reproduces the functions of those circuits.

The Macintosh can run a very sophisticated commercial emulator program called VirtualPC, which is now owned and sold by Microsoft. There are versions of VirtualPC that will run under MacOS 9 and versions that will run under MacOS X. Within the emulated PC (a make-believe Pentium box with a Sonnet S3 Trio video card, SoundBlaster compatible sound board, standard 101 key keyboard, etc etc), VirtualPC will allow you to install pretty much any standard PC operating system you want, from DOS 3.0 to XP Professional, Red Hat Linux to OS/2. Then, once the OS is installed, you can install PC programs appropriate to that OS and run them there. VPC will let you network and go online and access peripheral devices such as USB scanners and printers. It won’t necessarily work with peripherals that have connectors that the Mac does not have (parallel ports, PC serial ports, PS-2 mouse ports), though, even if you use an adapter, and probably only limited use of PCI cards (e.g., the card that gives you a second monitor under MacOS will not be seen by the PC environment because the emulated PC environment consists of a single Sonnet video card). An actual PC hard drive plugged into the Mac cannot be accessed by the emulated PC unless the Mac can also see and mount it (which pretty effectively eliminates access to NTFS-formatted drives, although FAT32 drives work OK) and even if you can see it you can’t boot your imitation PC from it — VirtualPC boots from a hard disk image file only.

On the flip side of things, the PC world has no equivalently solid Macintosh emulator but does have a collection of mostly free Mac emulators that each provide some functionality. The most robust of these are Basilisk II and SheepShaver, which run under PC Unix operating systems and under most flavors of Windows. Basilisk II emulates a Macintosh from the pre-PowerPC era. I don’t know the details of what it emulates in terms of other hardware, but the CPU instructions it knows how to deal with are those of the Motorola 68020, 68030, and 68040 (“68K”) chips. Basilisk II requires the presence of a Mac ROM file which needs to be obtained from an old relic Mac from the Macintosh IIx era through the Quadra era. Once you’ve got that, you can install Macintosh System 7 or early MacOS 8 from Mac installation diskimages, or you can download (legally, freely) bootable diskimages of System 7 and then insert a later Macintosh installation CD and upgrade to a later version. Under Windows, Basilisk does networking including AppleTalk and TCP/IP and it can go online. SheepShaver emulates a PowerPC chip and while it will not let you boot MacOS X it will let you install PowerPC versions of the Classic MacOS such as MacOS 8.6, and run PowerPC versions of Mac software. I should point out that doing so does not make it faster than Basilisk II — a real PowerPC Mac is faster than an old Quadra but if you have to emulate them both on the same PC emulating the Quadra is faster. But lots of software is not available in even moderately up-to-date versions that will run in the 68K Mac environment. Then there is PearPC, a new emulator, which will let you install MacOS X and run the latest Macintosh software — very slowly for now, because it is very new. They do appear to have networking functioning in both the Windows and the Unix builds of PearPC, though. (PearPC will also allow you to run PowerPC operating systems other than MacOS, such as Mandrake Linux for PPC). As with VirtualPC, Basilisk and Sheepshaver and PearPC will not let you boot from an actual Mac hard disk (they all boot from diskimages). In some builds you can boot from a Macintosh high-density floppy though.

Here’s a good MAC troubleshooting thread

Is it acceptable to post my HijackThis log here? I tried over at spywareforums and computercops and I get all sorts of “internal errors”.

Sure. Start a new thread in GQ for the purpose.

Here’s another FWI - If you download the freeware program Smart Popup Blocker 1.1 from www.downloads.com there is a problem with it that isn’t mentioned in any of the reviews. For some reason I can’t fathom, it changes your IE homepage url to ALL CAPS and removes any extentions after the /. And you know what? If the SD is that page, you’ll get a “page not found” error every time it does. It was changing the URL on me about 4 times a day before I decided that was the problem and uninstalled it. No problems since.

Will Spybot and Lavasoft remove adware and spyware for free?

Both Spybot Search and Destroy and Adaware are free programs, as is CWShredder and many others.

I meant Adaware.

I have Windows XP as the operating system on my computer. Can it be modified so that it can run 16-bit applications? Are there system drivers I can download to run MS-DOS programs?