Ok, this weekend I was checking out Audio Galaxy, and the MP3 sharing utility that has a piece of “spyware” called Web Enhancer. Apparently as part of the agreement in setting up the program, it loads Web Enhancer to send marketing information apparently to some company in Canada.
When reading user comments on download.com, I discovered that in Win 98 you can use Ctrl-Alt-Del to look at the tasks that are running. It told me that Web Enhancer uses the name “whagent”.
Well there are lots of programs running on my machine in the background. They are not set up in my startup folder, yet they start all the same. It doesn’t seem to give a complete explanation of the programs either, so I don’t know if they are part of Norton 2000, or some other piece of spyware I may not be aware of.
So the question basically is: How can I tell from a task list what tasks are associated with what programs? Any way to know which are friendly (systray) and which may be hostile (whagent).
There is no easy way to tell what the items inside of your task manager do or where they come from. Some are obvious by name, some are known from experience and some you have no clue about.
If you don’t have programs in your START folder then check SYSEDIT (select RUN from the START button and type SYSEDIT in the box). In the WIN.INI window look at the RUN line and see if anything is loading from there. Do NOT change or save anyting unless you know what you are doing. The WIN.INI is a holdover from the days of Windows 3.x and you usually won’t find anyting there but who knows? It’s easily done and worth a look.
There may be a way to find out this info from the registry but frankly you really don’t want to mess around in there. It’s cryptic at best and you can really hose a machine up if you change the wrong things in there.
I would just start clicking on END TASK in your task manager and see what happens. Leave SYSTRAY and EXPLORER alone. Anything else is fair game.
To find out what’s being run at startup, do the following:
[li]Click on the Windows “Start” button.[/li]
[li]Click on “Run” (near the bottom of the popup menu).[/li]
[li]Type (without quotes) “msconfig” and press enter. The program starts.[/li]
[li]Click on the “Startup” tab. In most cases, it’ll show what directory the program is running from. You can also disable a program if you know you don’t need it or want it.[/li]
If “msconfig” isn’t on your hard disk, you can find it on your Windows CD.
Also, in the System Info accessory, one or two of the tabs give a lot of information (more than I can figure out) about what is currently running.