Grongo

Lovejoy, Hijack This is an excellent program, but, personally, I would recommend it to someone with more experience. If you would like a very easy way to do a major scan for Trojans, you can use ewido for free. ewido can take quite awhile, and it uses lots of memory while it scans, so I suggest you call for the scan after you have finished using your computer for awhile. It takes maybe 15 minutes on a small system; hours on a big one. I set it to scan mine when I go to bed. ewido is not a substitute for other programs--it augments them. You can see a list at the ewido site, if you'd like to check its compatability with what you have. If "what you have" is nothing, you need -- MUST HAVE: a firewall (Windows XP has a default one that will do--I think it is really Avast! but I don't know for sure). A long-time free favourite is ZoneAlarm, which I have used for years. Other people have other favourites. -- MUST HAVE: an antivirus program: I like AntiVir Personal. Everyone has his favourite. USE JUST ONE. I used Symantic (Norton) for years $$$ before I found AntiVir, which is free and, I think, better. -- RECOMMENDED: a spyware killer. By far the best two are Spybot Search & Destroy, and Ad-Aware. You can use both, but one is fine. I like Spybot. -- you can add Spyware Blaster to the list if you like. Those are all in the "Protection" category. CCleaner is in the "Clean and Sweep" category. Of course, keeping your computer clean protects it to some extent, too. You run these programs every few days (or every few hours, it seems, if you're doing a lot of computer work). Spybot has a so-called "Tea Timer" guard, and you'll see the word "guard" on others like AntiVir and ewido, too. A guard watches the computer all the time; a scan goes from head to tail when you ask it. Guards, however, use system resources and you might think they slow your system down too much--decide for yourself. Firewalls like ZoneAlarm need only infrequent updating. Antivirus programs and spyware killers should be updated about once a week. Updating your antivirus program is crucial. Hope that helps. For now, though, ewido will do the job very efficiently. ewido is at http://www.ewido.net/en/

Good stuff. Thank you.

Or else you can try K-Meleon, if you'd like something faster and lighter. K-Meleon works, for example, on Windows98 systems very well. It is a cousin to Firefox, also based on the Gecko Runtime Engine (1.7.12). K-Meleon is for Windows ONLY. Any Windows, but it must be Windows. Because it is not cross-platform, it carries far less weight than Firefox. K-M comes up very basic-looking at first, and it has no extensions. That might scare you off. The browser does no advertising, and has no hype. Most of its users are also very familiar with Firefox and Opera. They are pretty well non-competitive people, so they are open to discussing the merits of other browsers with you. Once you get used to K-Meleon's tweaks, you can actually customize it and tweak it much more than you can Firefox. But it is not a competitor. It is a different creature altogether. If you like the extensions concept, you might not like K-Meleon. K-M is supported by one of the most friendly, helpful, and mature forums on the Internet. You can go to the forum and you'll see a green sidebar. There you can download the official version, using GRE 1.7.5, from January. Then you update it by inserting an automatic update file to 1.7.12. Does that sound like fun? Then you'll love it. Does it sound nasty? Then stay with Firefox. K-Meleon also has experimental versions using GRE 1.8x and 1.9x. You get everything via the forum. http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/forum/list.php?f=1

I've been using both cleaners in tandem. System Security Suite (3S) was last updated in May 2004. I've compared the lists, but I'm not absolutely sure. Do you see anything on the 3S list that makes it useful to keep as well as CCleaner? If I won't be missing anything, I'll switch to using CCleaner only. System Security Suite is at http://www.igorshpak.net/ Thanks.