NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, September 2008
Practical Application of Free Software
By Ira Wilsker, APCUG Director;
Columnist, The Examiner, Beaumont, TX; Radio & TV Show Host

Iwilsker@apcug.net
(click to email author)


WEBSITES:
http://housecall.antivirus.com
http://www.iobit.com
http:// www.wisecleaner.com
http:// www.ccleaner.com

For the past several weeks, I have written about some of the best free software available, and how it can save the user significant money if used instead of commercial software. I recently had the opportunity to put some of this free software to use, and successfully improved the performance of an older notebook computer.

I was in Atlanta for the wedding of one of my daughters. She had complained for weeks that her several year old Compaq notebook (laptop) computer was sluggish, and running slow, and that over recent days, prior to the wedding, it was outright crawling in performance. The computer had an antiquated Celeron processor, and 512 megs of memory, and was running XP Home edition. She asked me that if I had time while in Atlanta, could I please look at her computer; with wedding related expenses, and graduate school costs, money was a little tight and a new computer was at present beyond her tightly stretched budget.

A quick inspection of her computer indicated that she had a lot of unnecessary software running, multiple toolbars on her browser windows, a registry that had never been cleaned of obsolete entries, a badly fragmented hard drive, and a host of other problems. To compound her prior problems, a series of house guests from the grooms family, had downloaded several so called free games and other items to her computer. Several of those free games contained forms and varieties of malware, which were now installed and running on her computer, consuming her scarce and limited resources.

While she had a major internet security suite installed, which I verified was running and up to date, several of the malware items had been installed despite the security software. Reviewing the security log created by the security suite, the security software did indeed catch the bulk of the malware while the free games were being installed, but when the user was asked what to do when the malware was detected, the unknown users selected the choice that it was OK to install, thus overriding the protective security barrier. The firewall also detected malware that was calling home, but the unknown user chose to allow that communication, a dangerous and improper choice. To detect and kill almost all of the malware, I decided to perform one of the free online security scans, and ran Trend Micros excellent Housecall product (housecall.antivirus.com). The Housecall scan detected and removed several Trojans and spyware products, but five pieces of malware could not be removed because they were loaded into memory and currently running; I made note of those five problem items.

Next, I uninstalled almost a dozen games and other free games and other recent downloads, some of which would not fully uninstall, an indication that they may be loaded and running or otherwise protected from deletion, a symptom of many types of malware. There was some overlap between the items that could not be removed by Housecall, and those that could not be uninstalled by Add/Remove programs. I next examined her startup files using the latest version of IObits Advanced Windows Care Personal Edition (the free edition), which I downloaded from http://www.iobit.com, and installed. By choice, I only ran the manual startup utility (Tools Startup), rather than the automated one-click complete cleanup. I was shocked to find over 40 items loaded at boot, a grossly excessive number of useless programs and resource hogs. About one-half of the startup items were recognized by IObit, most of which were labeled as unnecessary which I duly unchecked, blocking them from starting at the next boot. I was familiar with some of the remaining entries unrecognized by IObit, and unchecked those I knew to be unnecessary. Remaining entries that I did not recognize were mostly identified by a web search, and almost all were unchecked. There were also a few entries for programs that had been identified by Housecall as malware, and were on my list of programs that would not uninstall.

They were unchecked, and the malware entries deleted. I rebooted the computer, which now only loaded about a third of what was previously loaded at boot, and it booted much faster, and there was a lower load on system resources, improving performance.

Now that the suspicious programs were not loaded into memory, the Add/Remove utility could uninstall the unwanted programs. Even though the programs were apparently deleted, there still could be obsolete entries in the registry, which can degrade performance. I downloaded and installed the free version of Wise Registry Cleaner from http://www.wisecleaner.com. What is especially nice about Wise Registry Cleaner (free edition) is that it will only delete, by default, those registry entries that can be safely deleted, and a backup file is automatically created in the unlikely event that a restore is necessary. My daughters Compaq had over 500 obsolete registry entries that could be safely deleted, which I did. One task that I did not perform, which would be a logical next step, would be to defragment the registry, which would result in a small increase in performance.

Being an older computer, it only has a 40 gig hard drive, which has been adequate for her purposes. She does have an external USB 2.0 160 gig hard drive that she uses for backup purposes and additional storage, so the 40 gig drive is not a major inconvenience. In viewing the contents of her hard drive, I noticed that she had a lot of obsolete and otherwise useless files that were consuming valuable real estate on her limited 40 gig drive, and that these files needed to be safely removed. I downloaded and installed one of my favorite programs that used to have a dirty name, but is now well known only as CCleaner (I will not say what the first C originally stood for). I downloaded the free CCleaner from http://www.ccleaner.com, installed it, and ran it. It is a fast program, and took about two minutes to run; in that two minutes it found thousands of obsolete and useless files, totaling 499 mb, almost a half-gig of wasted space. After running CCleaner, I ran XPs integral defragmentation utility, which reorganized her horribly fragmented hard drive.

My daughters old Compaq now runs almost as good as new, boots quickly, shuts down quickly, programs load and run faster, and there is a very noticeable improvement in performance. The total cost for the software utilities to perform these tasks was zero. The total time to perform these tasks was about two hours. There was nothing that was highly technical and geekish that had to be performed, and almost anyone can perform these same tasks with the same free software. If you have a now sluggish computer, and are willing to invest a little time, try following these steps. There are other things that can be done, such as installing additional memory. The possible improvement in performance may belay the need to run out and buy a new computer for the time being.

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