Monitor PC Performance, Train Your Mouse
Learn about your PC's inner life, cease needless clicking, and solve life's great puzzles--repeatedly.Laura Blackwell, PC World
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We work hard, and so do our PCs. We humans have useful pain and exhaustion sensations to help us figure out when to take a break. Our poor PCs, though, can't tell us how hard they're working. This month, let's look at a system monitor that improves a PC's reporting ability, a mouse utility that could soothe physical discomfort, and a mood-mellowing puzzle game to help humans and PCs enjoy a little quality time while building a friendly relationship.
But before you move on to these featured files, please scroll to the public service announcement at the very end of this column. Unbeknownst to us at PC World, a recently recommended file arrived with adware. Everyone who downloaded 3D Solar Traveler needs to know what this adware is and how to get rid of it.
Cool as a Cucumber
CoolMon's options window provides a list of tags that let you tell the program what stats you want to see.
You put your PC through its paces, so it's good to keep an eye on how it's holding up. How much are you pushing the CPU's capacity? How much of the total RAM are you using? Do you even remember how much RAM it had in the first place? CoolMon, a free program from The CoolMon Project, answers these burning questions and many others.
CoolMon installs an icon in the system tray; right-clicking that icon brings up a small window full of useful tidbits. It arrives with several suggested points of interest for both current stats (CPU usage, processes running, RAM usage, and so on) and important--but easily forgotten--information such as your IP address.
You can alter the window's appearance to suit your taste, but the best part is how much you can customize the information. Perhaps you'd like to know how much room you have left on your hard drive; or perhaps you're a little concerned about your notebook's battery life. The Display Items function lets you select CoolMon tags, which are very similar to HTML tags, from a list. This adds the information to display on CoolMon, and a few seconds with the Delete button removes the information you don't want to see.
CoolMon can remain as simple as it is the moment it's downloaded or grow as complex as you want to make it. Check out The CoolMon Project's site for news, extension programs, and thriving support and development forums.
The Mouse That Roars
Many computer users complain that mousing causes them pain and injury. I myself have been known to mouse with my nonwriting hand just to remove some of the strain. ActiveClick spares me the pain of clicking and lets my wrists relax. With this mouse utility, I park the mouse over a link or button; after a few seconds, it clicks for me.
ActiveClick appears on the desktop as a small window with a few easily identifiable buttons. With the triangular buttons, you can assign ActiveClick to substitute for the left, right, or middle mouse buttons, or the double-click function. Enabling or disabling ActiveClick takes one tap of the big round button. One of the small round buttons brings up the Settings menu, in which you can assign HotKeys and customize the auto-click period. Another small button launches the Help menu. True to the spirit of the program, there's no need to click a button just to see what it does. When you mouse over the smaller buttons on the program window, the title bar explains the button's function.
As you may have guessed, I'm not a medical professional, nor is the author of this program. If you believe you may have any kind of repetitive strain injury, please see a medical professional. Please.
ActiveClick offers a 14-day free trial. The program costs $25.
A Not-So-Jagged Edge
Jig Jag Gold is one smooth customer, richer and more entertaining than you'd expect of a sliding puzzle game. Instead of the simple squares you may remember, Jig Jag Gold's puzzles arrive in unusual, often asymmetrical, geometric shapes. Navigating the square tiles around them can be tricky, and piecing together several different images--each of them a different shape--in these strange spaces can be a real feat.
Unlike a jigsaw puzzle you complete once and then stow in the closet, Jig Jag Gold tests you on several different levels. You can pit your skills against the game in Puzzle, Strategy, and timed Arcade modes. Jig Jag Gold offers good replay value, too. Each of the 75+ puzzles in Puzzle mode can be replayed to attempt completion in fewer moves, and the Strategy and Arcade modes include bonus levels. The pleasant music, reminiscent of the Jeopardy countdown theme, exerts just enough pressure to emphasize the challenge.
You must register to download the trial version, which allows one hour of play--just enough time to scratch the surface. Once the trial's over, you can buy the game for $20.
Boot That Malware Into Orbit
Last month, I recommended a beautiful and educational screen saver called 3D Solar Traveler. It's come to light that this seemingly innocent program--a Shareware Industry Award nominee, no less--slipped some malware past the usual downloads screening process. 3D Solar Traveler 1.03 as formerly hosted at PC World contained a browser helper object called FavoriteMan. This far-from-favorite BHO "helps" by downloading more unsolicited software into your system.
If you're one of the unlucky folks who downloaded 3D Solar Traveler and didn't have a good, up-to-date spyware checker to protect you, please follow the step-by-step instructions on the next page to remove it.
Regardless of whether you downloaded 3D Solar Traveler, you may wish to install a reputable spyware-detection program to help prevent future invasions, and to rid your system of the alien face-huggers that adware such as FavoriteMan installs. Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy are both free for personal use.
Needless to say, no form of malware is welcome in the PC World Downloads library. Thank the heavens for the alert readers who detected the problem and let me know.
Ridding Your System of 3D Solar Traveler's Malware
Luckily for all of us, we have Privacy Watch columnist Andrew Brandt in our corner. Not only did Andrew confirm the spyware reports from readers and identify the Browser Helper Object as FavoriteMan, he wrote up the following step-by-step guide to removing it.
These instructions assume you've previously installed Spybot Search & Destroy 1.3; other products might catch different offenders, but this is what I use. You should have installed Spybot's latest updates, and generally understand how to use the program. I also assume you have a software firewall such as Zone Labs' ZoneAlarm, which can shut off Internet access temporarily. (Both programs are free.)
Launch Spybot, set it to Advanced Mode by selecting Mode, Advanced Mode, and then run the standard "Search & Destroy" scan.
When the scan is complete, it will list several categories of problems, which it can then repair. By default, all the problems are marked so that when you click the "Fix selected problems" button, the associated files are deleted. However, some will be cookies that you might not want to remove. The most important ones to delete are the following:
Leave the boxes next to these items checked, and click "Fix selected problems."
An Ounce of Prevention
You're not done yet. Some spyware applications, such as FavoriteMan, will download and install more copies if you don't prevent this. In order to temporarily stop the spyware from reinstalling itself, disconnect your computer from the Internet: Either physically pull the ethernet or modem cable, disconnect from your wireless network, or set your firewall software to temporarily block everything (in ZoneAlarm, click the Stop Sign icon at the top of the window).
Next you'll need to delete the portion of the spyware that downloads the ad-displaying programs. This is called a Browser Helper Object, and you can delete it using a Spybot feature that is normally hidden.
In Spybot, click the Tools tab on the left side of the screen. In the right pane, click the check boxes next to the following tools (some of these may be filled in by default):
Although the tools appear in the above order, I'll go through each tool in order of importance, and tell you how to use it.
In the left pane, click the BHOs item first. In the right pane, look for items labeled with an exclamation point inside a yellow circle or a red circle with a white X; for example, you might have one named F1 Organizer Class. For each such item, click the item and then click the Remove button at the top of the screen.
Next, click the ActiveX item in the left pane. As with BHOs, if any of the items in the list that appears in the right pane has a yellow or red icon next to it, select that item and click the Remove button at the top of the screen.
You can safely delete any of these ActiveX controls: If Windows needs to reinstall any of the legitimate ones, such as MSSecurityAdvisor Class, it will do so when it needs the control, and you will see a dialog box asking for permission to proceed.
Policing for Adware
You've now deleted everything that you can before you must restart to get rid of the rest of the files. But there are a few more steps that you should take to prevent the spyware from coming back.
Click the Resident item in the left pane, and then fill in both check boxes (the ones under the title "Resident protection status") for SDHelper and TeaTimer. These are both small applications that Spybot uses to keep tabs on spyware that installs itself automatically, and they will alert you if something tries to insert a Browser Helper Object or some other form of hidden software. If, for example, you later see a dialog box warning you about such an action, and you are not intentionally installing a Web browser plug-in such as the Adobe Reader or Google Toolbar, you can click the Deny button in that dialog box to keep the spyware from loading itself.
Next, click the Browser Pages item in the left pane. If you see any items that link to DLL files or executable applications (.exe) on your hard drive, double-click the item in the list, type about:blank and press Enter. This keeps spyware from redirecting your browser to another Web site.
After that, click the Hosts File item in the left pane, then click the Add Spybot S&D Hosts List button at the top of the window. This blocks the thousands of Web sites that host spyware from being able to load their programs onto your computer.
Lastly, click the IE Tweaks item in the left pane and ensure the "Lock Hosts file read-only as protection against hijackers" check box is filled. This ensures that the previous step, in which you added the Spybot hosts list, does not get deleted by spyware applications.
At this point, you will need to reboot your PC to stop any spyware applications that are still running in memory. When Windows comes back up, these programs will not be running--but they'll still be there on your hard drive, and you'll want to delete them.
In Windows Explorer, navigate to your Temp folder: For Windows 2000 and XP, it should be C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp (where username is the user name you use to log in to Windows); for Windows 9x and Me, it's probably C:\Windows\Temp. Select everything inside the Temp folder and press Delete. Right-click the Recycle Bin and select Empty Recycle Bin.
Breathe a sigh of relief: You've just rid your PC of spyware!
PC World Senior Downloads Producer Max Green, Associate Editor Melissa Perenson, and Senior Associate Editor Andrew Brandt contributed to the reviews on page one; Andrew Brandt wrote page two's spyware removal instructions.