Sure-Fire Fixes for a Problem PC

Is your PC troubled? Maybe it has the blues (it wants to be a Mac). More likely, it's suffering from any of a dozen things, such as a corrupt file, a bad app, or even a moribund CMOS battery. Read on for PC therapy.

The Hassle: My PC freezes periodically. How do I unfreeze it without losing my work or having to reboot?

The Fix: In Task Manager, select the Processes tab, choose Explorer.exe, and click End Process. (Just ignore the scary message.) Select File, New Task (Run...), type explorer, and click OK.

The Hassle: Your advice helped me unfreeze my system--but it keeps happening, and I can't go on like this. What now?

The Fixes: Start with the usual suspects: Scrub your Temp and Internet cache folders. First, use CleanCache 3.0 (see Tool of the Month on the next page of this article). Then run Windows' Check Disk utility with Automatically fix file system errors and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors checked. (Open My Computer, right-click the drive, select Properties, choose the Tools tab, and click the Check Now button under 'Error-checking'.) Also, send your antispyware and antivirus tools into action.

No luck? Try getting rid of damaged ActiveX programs. From Control Panel, choose Internet Options, the General tab, Settings, and View Objects. Right-click to delete any items marked 'Damaged' in the Status column. You might have a corrupted file, so run System File Checker to verify (and, if necessary, reinstall) those files on your system: Click Start, Run, and then type CMD. In the command window, type sfc /scannow and wait awhile; the scan seems to take forever to complete.

If your PC is still having problems, they may be more deep-rooted. You'll have to try a few techniques to figure out which program or process is causing the freezing. Sysinternals has three superb free diagnostic tools. FileMon gives you a real-time view of every running program and lets you know what it's doing, recording and time-stamping each action an app takes; watch for a specific program's behavior just before a freeze. RegMon does the same for the Registry, while Process Explorer does the dirty work on Windows processes.

Boost your computer's performance by clearing the tray of useless icons

Want to see the winner of the most bloated system tray award? It weighs in with 30 icons and counting. This month I'll tell you how to shake the system tray free of worthless items while retaining the essential ones.

The Hassle: Every time I boot up my Windows XP Home system (which takes forever), heaps of icons appear in my system tray. I checked my Startup folder and, except for two items, it's empty. Where are these programs coming from, and do I need to keep them all?


The Fix: Your computer's definitely stressed. There are two issues. First, every time you boot, Windows has to load the programs or processes represented by some of those icons. Second, and more significantly, they're gobbling up resources and CPU cycles, slowing down your system. It's a safe bet (I'll even give you odds) that plenty of the items are useless, can be dumped, and won't be missed.

Removing the junk from your system tray can be an exciting adventure. (Stop laughing. It's better than emptying the dishwasher, right?) Determining what applications are loading behind the scenes is the easy part; figuring out which ones you can safely remove is harder.

My cohort, Woody Leonhard, scratched the surface of the system tray in January's "Gunk Busters" feature. I've got more to say, and it's summed up in two words: WinPatrol Pro. The latest version, 9.8, is a must-have tool.

WinPatrol works in two ways. First, when you install a program and it tries to add an icon to the tray at boot-up, you'll get a WinPatrol warning--and a way to nip it in the bud (or kill and remove it afterward). That's important for programs such as AOL, Apple's QuickTime, and RealPlayer, all notorious for adding junk icons. WinPatrol also enables you to stop programs such as Adobe Acrobat that insist on running useless, daily version-update checks; and it prevents programs from changing file extensions willy-nilly.

Second, WinPatrol gives you an easy way to comb through existing background-loading programs; its 'info' button provides basic details, including the company name, version, and startup location--enough to help you figure out which entries are removable. The free version is good, but I strongly urge you to spend $25 for the Pro version. Its comprehensive database gives you more details and specific recommendations for which programs to keep and which to remove. I promise you'll get that money back by eliminating your system tray headaches.

Quick tip: Rather than remove an entry, I use WinPatrol's Disable feature until I am sure the entry is unnecessary.

WinPatrol also removes tracking cookies, monitors services, watches Internet Explorer helpers, and blocks Sony's annoying rootkit-like DRM scheme.

By the way, if you want lots of programs running from the system tray, don't mind the clutter, and are willing to spend some bucks, you can improve your PC's startup speed simply by adding more RAM. I maxed out my computer with 2GB and rarely experience resource issues.

Tool of the Month: Unclutter Your Desktop

I preach neatness, but my notebook's desktop is an unholy mess, with icons everywhere. That's fine with me--until I have to do a presentation and everyone gets a look at my disorderly desktop. My trick is to use an obscure feature built right into Windows to temporarily hide my desktop icons. Right-click your desktop and uncheck Show Desktop Icons under Arrange Icons By. This tactic is also ideal when I need to capture a screen shot of a dialog box and want a blank background.

Website's Back Door

Ever experienced this? You ask Google to look something up; the engine returns with a number of finds, but if you try to open the ones with the most promising content, you are confronted with a registration page instead, and the stuff you were looking for will not be revealed to you unless you agree to a credit card transaction first....
The lesson you should have learned here is: Obviously Google can go where you can't.

Can we solve this problem? Yes, we can. We merely have to convince the site we want to enter, that WE ARE GOOGLE.
In fact, many sites that force users to register or even pay in order to search and use their content, leave a backdoor open for the Googlebot, because a prominent presence in Google searches is known to generate sales leads, site hits and exposure.
Examples of such sites are Windows Magazine, .Net Magazine, Nature, and many, many newspapers around the globe.
How then, can you disguise yourself as a Googlebot? Quite simple: by changing your browser's User Agent. Copy the following code segment and paste it into a fresh notepad file. Save it as Useragent.reg and merge it into your registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Micro$oft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent]
@="Googlebot/2.1"
"Compatible"="+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html"

[Replace '$' to 's' from registry address line of above code] Voila! You're done!

You may always change it back again.... I know only one site that uses you User Agent to establish your eligability to use its services, and that's the Windows Update site...
To restore the IE6 User Agent, save the following code to NormalAgent.reg and merge with your registry:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Micro$oft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent]
@="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)"

[Replace '$' to 's' from registry address line of above code]