A great application that many people don’t know about is CCleaner. This application will clean out your temporary files, optimize your system registry, and increase your privacy with a number of products you use. Many people don’t realize it, but, you are accumulating files on your computer with typical daily use that don’t need to be there. Internet browser temporary files and Windows system files take up space on your computer and should be cleared up from time to time. I encourage everyone to head over to www.FileHippo.com and download CCleaner. This is the best application currently out there to solve this problem. After installing the program you will see a bunch of check boxes for different things the program will clean up. Personally I choose to disable clearing my browser history and recently typed URLs under the browsers that I use regularly. If you don’t care about your browser remembering links you typed previously feel free to leave those options checked. I do however recommend checking to clear all Temporary Internet Files. People can get gigabytes of information stored there over a period of time.

The Windows Explorer section doesn’t do anything that drastic so I tend to keep them all checked. Under system, however, there are some important boxes to check. I have in the past run into people who use their Recycle Bin as a storage area. They were shocked when I emptied their Recycle Bin and said “I had important files in there”… If this is your method of file backup I ask that you take your computer to your local charity and donate it for your own protection and for the benefit of someone less fortunate. The Recycle Bin is a trash bin. If you keep your important documents in the trash can out on the curb of your house and are surprised that the truck drove up and took them away this is the same situation. The next option is Temporary Files. These are files that your operating system creates and are usually not something you will need to access later. Clear out Memory Dumps also. Depending on your settings these can be very large at times. I check all but Font Cache in this section and have never had any issues. The Desktop and Start Menu Shortcuts option made me nervous at first, but, it seems to clear out icons that are no longer valid.

The advanced section has some options that won’t make a huge difference. You will get a notification on some that you will need to restart certain services if you select those options. Choose what seems beneficial to you in this section. I would not recommend selecting Wipe Free Space unless you want to ensure that someone could not “undelete” files from your computer.

Under Applications the top will show settings for each of your browsers. Internet Cache is fairly safe to remove. Internet History is depending on your personal preference. I would be cautious of whether to remove Cookies or not. Cookies are what remember your preferences for individual sites throughout the Internet. If you check the Saved Form Information box this will make your browsers forget information like City, State, and Address information that might be remembered from a previous form you may have filled out previously. At the bottom you will see a Compact Databases choice. Your database stores your bookmarks, history, and other data. CCleaner can defragment this database to help save some space.

The Applications, Internet, Multimedia, Utilities, and Windows sections are based upon the software installed on your computer. There are not individual settings for each of these programs, but, it will not do any drastic changes to your application. I leave all of these checked so that files are not built up over time from these applications. It is fairly safe for you to choose all of these boxes.

At the bottom of the screen you have an Analyze option and a Run Cleaner option. If you Analyze it will only tell you what could be removed and how much space it would free up. This is generally a good idea when it is your first time running the application. This will give you an idea of what you are getting yourself into. If you are content with what it is telling you go ahead and press the Run Cleaner button. You will, however, need to close any browsers that you have open before pressing this button. If you do not close your browser it will not be able to clean out the temporary files in some instances.

Next lets look at the Registry tab. The Windows Registry is a set of files that contain all of the settings for your Windows operating system. It will remember settings such as what program do you open a .doc file with or what programs will start-up when you logon to your computer. As programs are added, updated, or removed from your computer your registry will build up items that are broken or missing. The Registry cleaner will remove these items allowing your registry to run more quickly. If you are an advanced user you may see entries that you want to be there and don’t want to be detected in future scans of this application. You can right-click on that entry and add it to the Exclude List. Next time you select Scan for Issues it will not show that particular item in the results. The CCleaner Registry cleaner is not an aggressive registry cleaner. I have never had a case where it has caused problems with any computes that I have run it on so you should be fairly safe when using it. Select Fix selected issues and then choose Fix All Selected Issues. You may want to run this application once a week or once a month at a minimum. Many users will see some noticeable performance improvements from doing these steps. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and I will try to respond.

First of all head on over to the RootzWiki.com website and check out the thread discussing this release. They have a number of videos and a lengthy description of what works and does not on the first post.

http://rootzwiki.com/showthread.php?4011-RELEASE-ALPHA-Discussion-CyanogenMod-team-Touchpad-port

This is a very early release of the product and a number of items will not be working completely. I will keep everyone updated on the progress as I test out this alpha release.

What is a virus? A virus can be spread through internet and network connections or on physical media such as floppy drives, USB drives, or CD-ROMs. Many programs people say is a virus is actually a form of malware, spyware, ad-ware, worm, or Trojan horse. A virus is able to reproduce itself from one device to another.

 The first virus was named the “Creeper” virus. It was first detected on ARPANET which later became the internet. Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies wrote it in 1971 as an experiment. It would display the message “I’m the creeper, catch me if you can!” on the remote machines. A program named “Reaper” was created to delete the “Creeper” virus.

 Viruses come in many forms:

1. A boot sector virus will copy itself to the first section of your hard drive and will be activated when you boot-up the machine. We will discuss later how to clean these up.
2. A macro virus will use another program such as Word, Excel, or Access to spread to other documents.
3. Root-kit virus is an undetectable virus. Root is the administrator user account on Linux machines. Rootkits are usually installed by Trojan horse viruses and will hide themselves in with operating system files.
4. Memory resident virus will sit in the RAM (Random Access Memory) after a program initiates the virus from the hard drive.
5. Polymorphic virus will create many copies of itself, but, it will also change its digital signature each time which makes them difficult to detect.
6. Logic/Time bombs are viruses that activate on a certain day or on a certain event. In 1991 there was the Michelangelo virus.
7. Browser high jacking is when a program will take over a browser by redirecting to preset websites or corrupting search results.

 What is a Trojan horse? A Trojan horse can be very destructive. It will mask itself as a program that you want, but, ends up stealing information or damaging your system. Unlike a virus it does not replicate itself. The term comes from the Greek myth of the giant wooden horse in the Trojan War.

 What is malware? Malware or “malicious software” is a program that is made to gather information, make something unusable, or gain access to something that is restricted. Malware can be something that is just annoying to very dangerous.

 Malware is a blanket term which covers viruses, worms, Trojan horses, spyware, malicious adware, and root-kits.

What is spyware? Spyware will collect information about users without their consent. They can include a key logger which will record every key that is pressed on your keyboard which is later relayed to the malware maker.

What is a worm? Like a virus a worm is self-replicating. They will use a computer network to send copies of itself to other computers without any user intervention. The reason this is not a virus is due to the fact that it harms the network and does not modify individual files on the computer.