Dwight Watt - Watt Thoughts #166 8/7/2008


#166 – Software Update (Watt Thoughts)

I am going to discuss several pieces of software. One for cleaning certain spyware, a new search engine and a program to clean your registry.

Several people I know have recently run into the Windows 2008 Anti-Virus spyware program. It produces lots of false positives of spyware/viruses on your machine and makes it slow down. The people that wrote this one have put a lot of time in it and come up with very professional screens and messages and have a web page that offers to let you pay them to clean up the mess they made of your machine. Many of the programs I usually use to clean spyware/viruses find it and some claim to clean it, but then when you start back up the messages start reappearing about you are infected and the other problems. The only program I have found at this point to clean it is Super AntiSpyware at http://www.superantispyware.com It will find it and clean that spyware off your machine. AVG, Ad-aware, AVAST, and Spybot do good jobs on cleaning spyware and viruses (Ad-aware and Spybot only do spyware) and are free for personal use. I suggest using several programs to clean and prevent. I personally use Norton AntiVirus as a paid product to also prevent getting infected.

There is a new search engine out that was created by Google veterans that is receiving publicity at the end of July. It is called Cuil and it is available at www.cuil.com. They claim to have a much larger database of pages they have searched and claim to be more accurate on getting results.

My experience in using the search engine was disappointing. I did a search on Dwight Watt. Many more pages were found than on other search egines, but oddly after looking thru several pages of results my page (www.DwightWatt.com) did not turn up and there were a number of sites it showed that had stuff on descriptions from one of those pages but when I went to them had nothing about either subject in them and looked like name holders. I will see if they get it better. Until then I don't see any threat by them of Yahoo and Google.

Zuula (www.zuula.com) is an interesting search engine that actually works off several engines and lets you look at the results from several places. Accoona (www.accoona.com) was a new search engine that appeared several years ago, but has turned in to a business search and does not seem to work correct anymore.

If you need to clean your registry (and it does need cleaning occasionally to remove lots of extra left over entries if you add and remove programs very often) ccleaner is freeware that does a good job. It works in different versions of Windows. It is available at www.ccleaner.com

Dwight

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