As you have seen on other parts of my site, I enjoy programming, am in school for a bachelor's degree in CIS with minor in CS, and work in the PC support field. Recently, there has been a growing tide of worms, viruses, and trojan horses infecting thousands, or even millions of machines running primarily Windowsxx.
With this in mind, I have put up this page to link you to known, trusted, and efficient utilities. Some of these are commercially available (but free), some are small scripts and programs I have written, others have been created by other hobbyist programmers, who hate this flood as much as you, and have created tools to deal with the problem.
Some of the tools listed accomplish other goals, and are described below.
I have a definitions page describing the differences between Spyware, Adware, Malware, Viruses, Trojans, and Worms are. While all of them are nasty, some are far more insidious than others.
| Problem | Discussion of tools available | Tool(s) to use |
| Internet Explorer running slow, or not loading certain pages | Most likely, you have an inordinate number of Internet Temp
Files on your machine. Under Windows 2000 or XP, you can run my IECln tool listed in to the right. You should
also trim your cache settings. To do this, go into IE, click on
Tools then Internet Options. On the first tab listed
in the Internet Options window, click on Settings... and
make sure the 'Amount of disk space to use' is under 10Mb,
preferably 1. Then click OK. When that window closes, click on
Delete Files... (next to Settings...), and select to
'Delete all offline content', then click OK. This will keep your
IE cache from growing too out of hand. Running my cleaning tool
periodically (at least every couple weeks), will keep IE running
quite a bit faster than it normally would. Another student from Elon has created a couple repair utilities also. Go check his site if IECln doesn't help your IE problems enough. |
IECln is a quick utility to clean IE's Temporary Internet Files for the current user in 2000 & XP |
| AIM Problems | There are a bunch of different AIM viruses and worms running around, most of them invading your machine after you click a suspicious link in a buddy's profile. One of my co-students has created AIMFix to take care of those infections. He updates it quite often, so be sure to grab the latest version from the link on the right. I use this program routinely when working on infected machines. | AIMFix |
| Virus infection | There are myriad virus scanners available. Some are better
than others, but the two that top my list are F-Prot and
Anti-Vir. McAfee and Norton are commercial products that have lost
potency and speed over the years. I use Anti-Vir at home, and find
it to be very fast. It is free, and updates frequently. F-Prot's DOS and Linux command-line scanners are free for personal use, but the Windows version costs about $30 to register. The only drawback to the 'freeness' of F-Prot for DOS, is that you have to boot into Safe Mode with Command Prompt under Win2k and XP to run it, though sometimes it won't run correctly even in the command prompt, since it doesn't handle NTFS drives well. The virus definitions are updated extremely frequently, though. Sometimes more than once per week. McAfee is the standard virus scanner at Elon University. It works OK, and will normally let you delete even protected infected files. Norton is not bad, but it doesn't catch as many as McAfee or F-Prot, and so it is last on my list. McAfee and Norton are only available commercially. Another must-have utility is Stinger, a standalone cleaner produced by the same folks that bring you McAfee. Stinger is free, but is not a virus scanner, per se, but a tool to remove specific infections from your drive. It is updated fairly frequently, and is available via the link to the right. |
Anti-Vir F-Prot for DOS F-Prot virus defs F-Prot macro virus defs Stinger |
| Spyware, Adware, and Malware | If you receive those annoying pop-ups from places like Save
Now, CommonName, Golden Casino, and others, even when you're not
online, you have a spyware problem. In general, spyware (aka
adware and malware) are small pieces of software deposited either
by websites, in the form of cookies, of by 'free' programs you may
have downloaded and installed. Spyware tracks certain of your
movements and actions to deliver targeted advertising to you, or
to allow individuals with nefarious intentions access to your
computer. KaZaa is one of the most famous programs for depositing
spyware on your PC. This is why I run KaZaaLite, a free clone that
has no advertising. But, it is becoming very hard to find. If you
are interested in a copy, please send me a message with your name
and location (at least state/country, but knowing your city or
general region would be cool to see who's visiting my website) via
e-mail. I promise to get back to you within a few days, unless
my computer is down. To clean spyware off your computer, you need to run Ad-Aware and SpybotSD. I run them frequesntly on my personal system, and (even with precautions I take) they find a few objects per week. If you have never run one of these scans before, you can get instructions at my friend's website. We run these tools at Elon Student Computer Services on every machine that comes in, and routinely find a few hundred spyware files on student machines. |
Ad-Aware and Spybot-SD. You may find that your virus scanner also helps remove these products... but they don't always. |
| Combining files | This is an interesting problem. My dad requested a tool a while back that would allow him to concatenate files for importing into Excel for analysis. After searching online for a little bit, I decided I could solve the problem faster if I just wrote the tool myself. Its current incarnation is available from the link to the right. The version posted right now will only work in Windows 98/Me. I should have a fix up so it works on NT/2k/XP by this weekend. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, the file concatenation tool is completely free. I don't support it beyond what you find on my website, but I am always happy to take into consideration any ideas you may have for improvement/change. Feel free to email me at my frequently checked email address. I do check others that I have, but this is checked the most. | File concatenator |
| Search files... | Here's another problem my dad needed help with. He had a set of files with certain values at the beginning of lines that he needed to grab out. So he asked me how to do it. I wrote this very simple program in about 20 minutes to get every line in a file where the first characters match the pattern entered. I will be implementing command-line arguments in it shortly, but this is a healthy first cut, especially since it works, and was quick to put together. | grabline for Windows grabline source |
| Generating usernames and passwords | I needed to build several difficult-to-guess passwords recently, and decided to write a program to do it for me. Building off the lcgp I wrote this summer, I wrote a quick utility called pwd. | pwd for Windows pwd for x86 Linux pwd for x86 Linux, zipped pwd source pwd online |
| WEP key generator | Along the lines of my password generator, here is a WEP key generator for your wireless networks. | WEP online |
| Number stream generator | Another tool along the lines of my password tool and WEP builder, this will give you a stream of pseudo-random numebrs, neatly aligned for easy copy and paste. | nsg online |
| Live Linux CD | I have become a big fan of the Slax Live Linux distribution. I host a copy on another domain. If you're interested in learning more about this, please check out the main site. | Slax current |