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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week - 05/26/05 |
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A review
of Microsoft Anti - Spyware Beta1 program – can’t beat it for the
price and it has some great diagnostic tools The
evolution of the WWW has led to many problems nobody had foreseen. It has
allowed dangerous programs like computer viruses, adware and spyware to
spread like wildfire, and be totally undetected by the average user. Since the
evolution of the pc industry back in 1975, Microsoft has stayed out the
“Software Utility” marketplace, and focused on their Office Suite
and languages. But now so many problems have emerged on the web compromising
the security of Microsoft products that the company has launched an all out
assault against them. Microsoft
anti-spyware is a very good free program the company released a few months
ago, aimed at protecting your computer against spyware and adware. You can
download this program at Microsoft.com.
As with many Microsoft programs, they bought an existing company –
Giant Antispware - and are now
improving and marketing it now under the Microsoft name. The
program requires that you have a Pentium processor, be running Internet
Explorer 6.0, and have the Windows 2000 or XP operating system. It’s
a relatively small program that installs easily, and then asks you several
questions as to how you want to run it. You can choose to run the program
continuously, which would be the best protection, or
on-demand as you wish to. You can also choose to have the program update itself periodically,
do a daily automatic scan of your computer, and you can choose to join their
anti-spyware community. In tests by leading pc
magazines and independent companies,
the program has been overall rated as good or better than most of the
competition. This includes other commercial programs and free programs like Adaware and Spybot I have previously reviewed here on Raw
Bytes. But to me
the Advanced System Explorer tools that are included in the program are
wonderful. They let you view and modify settings which are normally hidden or
hard to change, and they reveal a lot of very useful information. These
include a browser highjack restore function in case your browser gets
hijacked, and a tracks eraser, to protect your computer from privacy
invasions. They show hidden
programs that have installed themselves with your knowledge, such as Browser
Helpers and Active X programs, what programs are starting up when you turn on
your computer that you’re probably not aware of, and it let you analyze
and identify any file on your computer. My
favorite system tool identifies all current running programs. Normally your
computer is running dozens of programs in memory, and when you press Control
Alt Delete you see a window of all these programs, but
you have no way of knowing what they all are. Usually the first thing I do when I sit
down at a problem computer is to look into memory at these programs, because
often you can see Viruses and other bad programs in the list, but it’s been
difficult to identify them all. I use Microsoft
Anti - Spyware in addition to my regular Panda internet security program
. But get it while it’s
free – I can guarantee that with it’s success
it won’t be free for long. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2005 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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