Freeware discussion

Free Computer Protection Programs

If you are connected to the Internet it is essential to have virus protection etc. Protection from various types of malware is summarised below.  The more common free programs are listed, however there are a number of other free programs available. Most sites also have a Professional version (with more features) but the free version is all that most home users require. Links to the free versions are sometimes hard to find so (as at November 05) they are indicated below.
 
ANTI-VIRUS – prevents viruses from infecting your computer. - ESSENTIAL
Avast:            www.avast.com
This program runs in the background and updates automatically.
 
FIREWALL – monitors incoming and outgoing traffic. - ESSENTIAL
ZoneAlarm:  www.zonelabs.com
This program runs in the background. Click “Preferences” and click “Check for product updates ? Automatically”.

EMAIL MONITOR – you can view mail and delete spam, viruses etc before downloading it to your computer.
MailWasher:  www.mailwasher.net
Run this program before receiving mail.

ANTI-SPYWARE – searches your computer for malicious programs.
Spybot - Search & Destroy:  www.safer-networking.org
Enable Spybot resident – click on Tools > Resident
It is necessary to download updates and run the program regularly.

ANTI-ADWARE – searches your computer for malicious programs.
Ad-Aware:  www.lavasoft.de
 
ANTI-TROJANS – searches your computer for Trojans, which can send back information on your usage to external hackers.
a-squared:  www.emsisoft.com
a2 Free > Download a-squared free now
It is necessary to download updates and run the program regularly.

WINDOWS PATCHES – Microsoft’s update service to overcome problems in their software.
Microsoft:  windowsupdate.microsoft.com
Set it to notify you when new updates are available

Barrie Shepherd

 Content Advisor Settings

I have been faced with this problem before - someone has set the IE content advisor settings, so that they are constantly getting asked to allow or disallow access - but they can't change it because they have forgotten the Supervisor password used.

How to reset (remove) Content Advisor settings

The Content Advisor program was originally designed by the Internet Content Rating Association and others, but has for some years been an integral part of Internet Explorer. Many people have found that they do not want this kind of censorship, or that the program has behaved in very peculiar ways. Simple instructions for removing the program were available for earlier versions of Windows, but for Windows 2000 and Windows XP users were advised to contact Microsoft Support. Paul Kaufmann, one of our members, has done that, and received instructions from Microsoft Australia and New Zealand Technical Support, which he found to work perfectly. The instructions read as follows:

  1. Click on Start then Run and type in "Explorer" (without the quotation marks) and click OK. Click on the View menu and then Folder Options. Click the Select Show All Files and then click OK. Close Windows Explorer.
  2. Click on Start, Find and then File or Folders. In the Named field, type "ratings.pol" (without the quotation marks) and change the Look In field to C:. Click on Find Now.
  3. Right-click on ratings.pol and choose Rename. Change the name of the file to "ratings.old" (without the quotation marks). Repeat this step for each ratings.pol file found.
  4. A registry modification must now be completed. The registry is an important area of a computer, so it needs to be backed up before any changes are made to it. Click on Start and then Run, and type in "regedit" (without the quotation marks). Click OK.
  5. Click on the registry menu and then Export Registry File. Change "Save In" to "Local Disk (C:)", then double-click on the System folder.
  6. In "File Name" type in "regbackup" (without the quotation marks), and change the Export Range to ALL. Click on Save.
  7. Locate the following registry key by expanding the appropriate branches: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/software/Microsoft/Windows/Current Version/Policies/Ratings
  8. Right-click on the Ratings folder in the left pane and choose Delete. Hit Yes to confirm.
  9. Restart your computer. 
From: John Saxon: Sun, 9 Oct 2005 

Freeware

The two applications below were mentioned in the Freeware Newsgroup on 9 November 2005 by Michael LaPlante:

"This program has been mentioned here before, but it was recently updated. Advanced Diary from CSoftLab at: http://www.csoftlab.com/

"I've been playing around with it for a few days and am impressed.

"Like both these programs, it uses an Explorer-like hierarchy to organize notes. What's unique though is you can switch back and forth between calendar view and normal notes view. In calendar view, only those notes entered on a particular date appear under their respective sections. In normal view, all notes appear.
"Like Keynote, you can work with RFT text formatting. Unlike Keynote, you can
add tables to your notes.

"What usually kills these things for me is the search facilities, which typically will only search the current note. Like Keynote, this will identify all nodes that contain your search terms allowing you to jump immediately to the one that looks most likely. (Unfortunately, no options for AND / OR searches like Keynote.)

"Like both TP and Keynote, you can insert hyperlinks to external files, sites, etc as well as link to other nodes in the database. Although it only works with one database, you use the backup and restore facility to create multiple databases.

"Nice export facilities too. Exports to text or RTF as well as HTML though you have to use the print option(!) to export to HTML." 2nd program: Net Picker from www.netpicker.net

"This one is more useful for archival purposes. It's designed to store information copied from your browser. Works best with IE, but I've been using with Firefox. Information from IE.

"Each 'article' is stored as an individual HTML file in its Collection folder. The program essentially acts as a "wrapper" allowing you to organize the various articles in folders a la Keynote or Treepad.

"You can edit the articles as the program itself has some limited editing capabilities. The program can even be used as a standalone editor in either text or wysiwyg mode for simple tasks. (It does everything I want except add tables. Tables can only be done in text mode.) It can produce an index html file making it possible to use it to design relatively simple websites.

"It has a nice search feature. Search for a word, and it will search through all articles and produce a list of all articles containing that word. Click on the article name, and it will jump immediately to that article with all instances of the search word highlighted.
"It is freeware, though there are references to paying for it. I guess it was shareware at some point, and the developers haven't gotten around to updating all the documentation."

Cheers all, Michael


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