Regain control of your Windows XP Operating System

HOW TO Kill Unwanted Process: Windows XP

(This is also known as cleaning your system of Spyware)

Press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to start Task Manager



Select Process Tab


Select Show Processes from All Users

This is the list of the default process in Windows XP. Compare this to what is on your system. If you see application listed that are not here, this means they did not come with Windows (From Microsoft) and are either
A) Applications you installed and want to run.
B) Application you do not want to be running.



Select the process you wish to end, and select End Process. Anything not listed here can be killed without causing any harm to your system. (Except if you are in Notepad, and have not saved the document, you may loose changes, FYI)


Then Confirm, but selecting Yes.

Repeat as needed! For systems that have had lots of software installed, this list could be quite large. Cleaning time! By the way, the less that is running allows your system to operate more efficiently. You will notice that the system will perform faster upon finish of this procedure.

Note: Sometimes other processes will respawn (Restart) other processes. This is their attempt to not be killed using this method. If necessary, using KILL from the command prompt is required.

After killing the processes from running, the next step is to stop them from starting each time the computer boots up.

Download and run a program called Startup Control Panel. I have been using this for years as a more convinient way to edit the Windows registry. Mike, you are awesome! Download it directly here: http://www.mlin.net/files/StartupCPL_EXE.zip

Deselect all application you do not want to start up by default. Do not worry, as they can reenabled. This is only the list of applications that startup upon boot up.

Last step is to clean the system. Check out Housecall, from Trend. It's free, and it works well. Nice job Trend!

Jason

Quest's Spotlight

I recently learned about a nifty piece of software, developed by the folks over at Quest called Spotlight. It comes in a few different flavors. I have been playing with the freeware version of Spotlight on Windows for a few weeks now. There are some bugs with the software, but what more can you ask for for free?

One of the coolest features is its drilldown functionality, so you can quickly decipher the route cause as to a resource overutilization, but more importantly: how it saves history, so you can ascertain what was happening at a particular day/time. Nice work Quest!



Very nice UI and not too shabby animations.

http://www.quest.com/spotlight-on-windows/


Jason

Building Blocks -- Software Architecture & Planning

I wrote an article. 0.5... initial public release.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=dg3wfk2z_1cdrm8q&hl=en

Jason

First Post

This is my first post on this site. I used to have a blog. I used to have a server. But it died. Perhaps I will reinvest in to its replacement. In the meantime, you can read things here.

Feedback always appreciated.

Jason