Have You Invited A Spy Into Your Computer

Writen by Maria Marsala

Yes, it's true. You may have inadvertently invited a spy into your computer. This spy is known as "spyware, adware, or trojans", and once it is in your computer it starts taking statistical information as you travel the Internet. In some cases, it may send you pop-up ads and slow down your computer. A wired.com article, mentions it "could even collect your credit card information".

How did you invite the spy?

Maybe you visited a website you knew and enjoyed only to find that it was recently purchased by a pornography site. The new company has imbedded "spyware" into the home page and now, in many cases without your knowledge, it is on your computer.

Maybe you downloaded a free or paid program and as part of the package you were provided with an added secret bonus – a "spyware" program. Spyware may also be placed on CD's you purchase, too.

Maybe you agreed to it! You could have downloaded a program and checked the box to allow the program to take statistics from you "for their own use".

Maybe someone sent you spam, especially porn spam, and that spam created the spy. Spys can easily be placed, without your knowledge, in pictures or HTML email.

What you can do?

Purchase a firewall program and it should let you know if a program is about to download from the website you are at. Note the word "should".

Or you can learn all about spyware, download an anti-spyware program, and schedule time in your weekly calendar to run an anti-spyware program. The first time I conducted a "clean up", on my 18-month old computer, I found 2 porn and 42 other spyware programs. Then a week later, I had 4 new spyware files appear.

To further reduce the amount of spyware that ends up in your e-mail Inbox, create a "rule" or "filter" that will move any e-mail containing "certain adult words of your choosing" directly to your delete or spam folder.

Norton and MacAfee the virus protection specialists, have added anti-spy programs to the list of maintenance programs they sell. However, according to information I've seen on email lists, they're not as anywhere as good as the Ad-aware program from Lavasoft.

Just a note: If a few people use your computer and each has their own log in password, when you run LavaSoft program, you need to run it under each password. Example: Let's say Katie and Molly have passwords on your computer. Log in as Katie and run Lava Soft. Then log out of Katie, and log in as Molly and "run the program again." I'm sure, you'll find additional spys under each log in name – just like I did last weekend when I cleaned and updated a friend's computer.

Use the resources below to help you learn more about Spy's:

Learn about protecting your computer from spam and spyware
http://www.unwantedlinks.com/
http://grc.com/optout.htm
http://www.spyware.co.uk/

Check for spyware on new software before you download it.
http://www.spychecker.com/

Free anti-spyware program.
Use it at least monthly and don't delete the items you really want! http://www.lavasoft.de/

Opt out of double click ads
http://www.doubleclick.com/us/corporate/privacy/privacy/ad-cookie/default.asp

Removing your e-mail, address and telephone numbers from lists.
http://www.dmaconsumers.org/consumerassistance.html#mail

Anti-Spam Tools
http://www.webattack.com/freeware/comm/fwspam.shtml

BONUS: Opt-out of credit card marketing mail
The three big credit-reporting companies provide your information to "resellers" or "vendors". To curtail this abuse, call toll free 888-567-8688. Listen to all the options before hitting a key. #3 is the best option to remove you "forever" (well till you change your phone number). Remember to get your cell phone number removed, too. Once you call them they will mail you a confirmation letter for you to mail back to them.

© 2004 Maria Marsala, Business Growth Strategist. Bringing women-owned service businesses our Wall Street expertise. Your bottom line is NO accident. If your income has been hovering or flat lining the past year or so, if you are working more than 35 hours per week and have no passive income stream, we need to talk. http://www.coachmaria.com You have nothing to loose and everything to gain!

How To Take Good Care Of Your Computer Even If You Are A Clueless Newbie

Writen by John Deprice

You know you should take care of your computer, but you don't know what registry is and what's the difference between hard-drive and memory stick is. Don't worry, these tools will do it for you and you don't even have to set them up.

O&O Defrag Professional (O&O Software GmbH)

The new O&O Defrag Professional Edition for Windows-based workstations unlocks the hidden performance of your computer. This software will optimize your hard disk in Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000 Professional, and Windows NT 4 Workstation, securely repacking fragmented files together for more efficiency.

O&O Defrag's O&O OneButtonDefrag Technology lets you sit back and relax while the optimal defragmentation configuration is tailored directly to your system. A job is created and then executed, making performance improvements on your system noticably faster. Even in large networks, this sort of automation can lead to unbelievable savings in network administration resources.

Webroot Window Washer (Webroot Software)

Many people do not realize that Internet browsers, as well as many other software products, store information about what they have been doing on their computer systems. Anyone can simply turn on your system and see exactly what you have been doing on your computer. Also, the tracks that are left behind can take up large quantities of valuable hard drive space. Recovering this space can be very beneficial by improving the overall speed and performance of a computer.

Cleaning up the history of your activities can be a tedious chore of manually removing each history file or entry. If privacy and disk space are to be maintained, this process must be performed every time you use your computer. Window Washer can automatically clean up your browser's cache, cookies, history, recent document list, and much more! Window Washer can run in the background and clean up your tracks when you are done surfing the internet or any other time you choose.

Acronis Disk Director (Acronis)

Acronis Disk Director Suite is disk partitioning software that allows you to automatically or manually resize, copy, and move partitions without losing data. It also lets you reorganize the hard disk drive structure and optimize disk space usage. Acronis Disk Director Suite provides a powerful, reliable, and easy-to-use way to manage booting of multiple operating systems on a single PC.

Disk Director's integrated Disk Editor program is the only utility in a consumer-level package that can read and write raw data directly from NTFS disks, and only experts should touch it. The interface is packed with essential tools for jumping to special disk sectors like partition tables and boot sectors. The help system is a detailed technical reference to disk structures.

Download Links:
http://www.deprice.com/oodefragpro.htm
http://www.deprice.com/webrootwindowwasher.htm
http://www.deprice.com/acronisdiskdirectorsuite.htm

John Deprice runs a website devoted to PC tools specifically for newbie users. Visit it at http://www.deprice.com/utilities-8-1.htm

How To Search Your Pc With Google Desktop

Writen by Nowshade Kabir

In this era of Internet, most people are frequent users of computers. Many of us use computers through out the day, accumulating morasses of information in various formats, which include email, digital photo, word document, spreadsheet, presentation file, ebook, article, other downloaded files, music, visited web pages, and many others. We stuff them in multiple folders in our PC. Before we know it, our hard drives become a storeroom of misplaced items. As a result, finding a needed file of information some times become a daunting task!

The search function integrated to Microsoft Windows is not a big help either. It requires you to know, albeit vaguely, where the file could possibly be located. If your data storage is significant and you made a search on your whole hard disk, it might take ages to get search results and, then again, there is no guarantee that you will find the right file. Frustrating? Thanks to new Google Desktop Search this is about to change!

What is Google Desktop Search?

Google Desktop Search is a free downloadable small program, which will quickly and easily find your files no matter where in your hard disk they are stored. The great thing about this program is by making your computer searchable, this program frees you from having to manually organize and sort your files, emails, and downloads. You no more have to mull over where in your PC the information you are looking for is residing – in your email, files or web pages that you browsed recently.

At present Google Desktop Search works only with the full text in Outlook and Outlook Express email, text, HTML, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, AOL chat, and Web pages viewed through Internet Explorer. Other files like PDF will be probably added in future version.

How it works?

Google Desktop Search is fairly easy to download and set up. The address for downloading the program is http://desktop.google.com. Once you installed the program, it begins initial indexing process of your hard disks. This may take several hours for an average size disk. The one-time indexing process only works when the computer has been idle for more than thirty seconds. Indexing for Google Desktop Search is an ongoing process, new files and emails get updated automatically. The search index created by the program resides on your own computer.

On your system tray you will see a swirled icon in Google colors, by clicking on it you will open the regular Google search page with the addition of Desktop along side with other search areas. Once the indexing is done, files are searched in under a second and the results are impressively precise. The top bar shows quantities of files found under the four categories, which include emails, files, chat and Web history. The results are shown in much the same way as regular Google interface. You can choose to see relevant results from all or any of the categories. You can also sort results by relevance or by date. By clicking on any result you open the file in respective application software.

The email query results are the best! No longer have you had to remember in which folder you stored the email written to John in reference to Peter. By searching for Peter or John, you will find all relevant emails and related correspondence. You can read and answer to any of the discovered email from the thread. This really saves time when you need to follow up to a large numbers of emails each day.

There are two more text buttons next to the search field. One is Desktop Preferences and other is Remove Items. Desktop preferences allow you to choose the types of files you would like the program to include in its index out of available ones. You can also point out not to index specific folders from your hard disk. If you share your PC with others, it's a good idea to eliminate your private folders from the Desktop index. You can also specify not to index certain websites from your cached web history as well. The Remove items button allow you to eliminate selected results from the index.

The advance search option allows you to search by phrase by putting the phrase within quotation marks, to eliminate a word from search by putting a minus sign in front of the word, to search by file type, and to search within a web URL. A neat feature is to integrate your desktop search with your web search. This is very handy if you have already done an extensive search for some information and after a few days doing search for similar information once again.

Privacy question

By default, Google Desktop Search collects a limited amount of non-personal information from your computer and sends it to Google. This includes summary information, such as the number of searches you do and the time it takes for you to see your results, etc. You can opt out of sending this information during the installation process or from the Desktop preferences later. According to Google Privacy Policy no personally identifying information, such as your name or address, will be sent to Google without your explicit prior permission.

What is missing?

I bemoan not having PDF files in the search process as yet. I have dozens of e-books and PDF whitepapers residing in my PC, and I really would prefer to have them indexed. That way, I'd have been able to read materials, when I needed them most.

The other thing I want to see is clustered result of my query, which shows organized search results into meaningful hierarchical folders similar to the way Vivisimo search engine works. This clustering is particularly helpful for desktop search, as this allows us to see other relevant documents connected to the searched word.

Conclusion

Due to Google's immense popularity as a search engine, it's logical that most users will prefer Google's desktop search program as oppose to other similar programs, such as Copernic and Hotbot. Finally you can search your very own computer with similar ease and preciseness as you have been searching the Internet for quite some time.

Nowshade Kabir is the founder, primary developer and present CEO of Rusbiz.com. A Ph. D. in Information Technology, he has wide experience in Business Consulting, International Trade and Web Marketing. Rusbiz is a Global B2B Emarketplace with solutions to start and run online business. You can contact him at mailto:nowshade[at]rusbiz.com, http://ezine.rusbiz.com/archivenews.html?nl_oid=46