XP SP2 Favorite software from the Yahoo group

The following programs are free (except where noted),
they all run on XP SP2, all are highly recommended
by various members of this Yahoo group, and you
are invited to download any or all of them
into your computer so you can test them
to see if they are of value to you.

Google can point you to tutorials and technical reviews
(use 'buzzword tutorial site:edu' without the quotes
to get tutorials from educational institutions).

The following software is presented in five groups:

Must Have Software
ZoneAlarm, Windows Defender (Beta 2), SpyBot, Ad-Aware, HiJackThis,
Tor Privoxy and TorCP, Firefox, IE7, Windows Live SafetyCenter, and Symantec.

Computer Internals
Belarc, SIW, CPU-Z, RegSeeker, Atomic Clock Sync, Tree Size Pro 2.2,
Copernic, and AM-Deadlink.

Internet internals
NeoTrace 3.5, Speakeasy Speedtest, and display IP address

Fun Stuff
Googe Earth, Yahoo Widgets,
Satellite Tracker, Radar weather maps, and AudioGrabber.

Miscellaneous
A list of 20 other software resources and programs.

MUST HAVE SOFTWARE

ZoneAlarm

ZoneAlarm is a program that was designed to protect US government computers from hacker intrusion. It is installed and used at all government computers including those at the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI and is the best protection that the US government has available. Many people in this group would never ever get on the Internet without the protection of ZoneAlarm. It will help make your computer invisible and will help prevent unauthorized entities from gaining access to your computer from the Internet. Additionally ZoneAlarm will not allow any software in your computer to access the Internet without your specific approval. The moderators and leaders of this group highly recommend using this firewall. It is frequently chosen over Microsoft's own firewall because it checks incoming AND outgoing Internet traffic. It is free for individual users and is available at www.zonealarm.com

Microsoft Windows Defender (Beta 2)

Many PC security experts highly recommended that you always have ZoneAlarm AND Microsoft Windows Defender (Beta 2) software up and running in your computer (assuming you are on XP SP2 with all recent updates). Microsoft Windows Defender (Beta 2) helps protect Windows users from spyware and other potentially dangerous software. The grape vine suggests this package may be included the next Windows operating system called Visa due to be released early in 2007. You can download Windows Defender (Beta 2) here: http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx and you can learn how to use it here: http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/howto/default.mspx

Spybot

Spybot, Ad-Aware (see below), and HiJackThis are frequently run one after another - they all catch and destroy (at your request) any suspicious datum in your machine. Available at www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

Ad-Aware

Ad-Aware is an excellent free product to help keep your computer clean. Available at www.lavasoftusa.com

HiJackThis

HiJackThis is a wonderful tool which you can use to find then delete unwanted or ugly programs that are running on your computer.

To use HiJackThis first you have to download it and install it on your computer from the web page below. Then when you run it and click on DO A SYSTEM SCAN AND SAVE A LOGFILE you will immediately see a first window open then after a few seconds a second window will open. Select All then Copy everything in the second window (Notepad) and Paste it into the paste window in the link below at the bottom, and click Analyze. After a short while you will see at the bottom of your screen a list of all the programs that are running on your computer with an indication of the threat they may pose. Click on a star to see details of the module. Those with green lights are ok and expected, yellow indicates a potential problem, and a red light indicates a real danger to your machine. Find the dangerous red programs in the FIRST window and click that entry. When all entries corresponding to the red flags have been checked, click on remove and they will be removed from your list of running programs. Most people save the log after running it the first time so they can later see if any new things are running. Available at http://www.hijackthis.de/en

How to use Spybot, Ad-Aware, and HiJackThis

After a cold start, or at least once a week, or anytime your computer is acting strange, some experts suggest it might be a good idea to delete ALL your cookies, run Spybot then Ad-Aware then HiJackThis (SpySweeper is an excellent problem program remover for $40, a year) and delete all the nasty stuff these programs may find, delete garbage files, run defrags on all your drives, clean your registry with RegSeeker, take a backup of your entire system, and maybe create a restore point.

You can check your computer online at Symantec and Microsoft.

Symantec

Sometimes, Symantec will check your entire system, free. If their servers are busy they may temporarily pull the link that you can use to download their software to check your system so you may have to look around for it. They are at: http://www.symantec.com/index.htm

Microsoft's Windows Live Safety Center

If you would like your complete computer environment checked out for problems try this Microsoft site at: http://safety.live.com/site/en-US/default.htm. Click on Full Service Scan

Tor, Privoxy, and TorCP

If you wish to surf anonymously there are hundreds of Anonymous proxy servers out there but the only one that is required to be used in all USA government owned computers attached to the Internet around the world is a group of three programs called Tor, Privoxy, and TorCP written by the folks at NASA. Bundled together they will give you an Internet communication system that makes your real computer invisible on the Internet and allows you to surf completely anonymously. Tor is freeware and it is wonderful but it works best on a computer with a fast Internet connection e.g. DSL and higher, and on a machine running XP SP2 with all current Microsoft fixes. Once the web page has arrived from the Internet into your computer via Tor, Privoxy will then do its thing filtering out all the ads that flash and pop and all sorts of other really bad stuff that comes in on web pages. You can control all of this yourself via macros. The green "P" in your task bar whirls when Privoxy is doing its thing. You can turn the bundle on and off via the tool section in your browser but most people let Tor and Privoxy come up automatically via ZoneAlarm and they just leave them up all the time. Tor will give you a new virtual IP that you can use to surf the Internet about every 10 minutes.

Tor is highly recommended for all your Internet activity particularly if you wish to surf in cyberspace with the same degree of anonymity that exists all over the real world as you travel in and out of restaurants and shops, or if you wish to avoid getting caught in traffic analysis nets that cause spam to be generated. Using Tor is currently lawful under U.S. law according to at least one attorney. If you want to experiment with Tor you will need to have administrator privileges. Surfing is slower using Tor especially in the first few weeks - it then seems to get back to an almost normal response. IE7 with Tor seems to run a little bit faster than Firefox Tor.

For an overview: http://tor.eff.org/overview.html.en - you can download version 0.1.0.16 from http://tor.eff.org/download.html.en and you can install it by using the instructions called "Win32 instructions" on the download page. HiJackThis acknowledges these three programs and colors them yellow. Click http://ipid.shat.net/iponly/ to see your own IP address at this moment.

IE7 beta is HOT

If you have a relatively new fast computer ( 2 - 3 years old) with plenty of memory, IE7 beta is a major improvement over IE6 with the addition of Tabs. Using IE7 you can bring up many many web pages all within one IE7 and if you click in the four little rectangles in the upper left you can see all your web pages in minatures. By clicking on any of the minatures the entire web page will flash up immediately - if you click on the following thumb print you will see 36 minatures in actual size.

IE7 is very very solid unless you have a slow small system or if you give it too many web pages to bring up, or if you try to look at web pages before they are all up. In this case IE7 may prevent you from opening ANY IE7 web pages, prevent any other software from coming up, and or make IE7 simply disappear. You can bring up other IE7s but if you bring up too many you may have to use the Task Manager to end any IE7 to free things up if XP or IE7 seems to be stuck. You can get IE7 at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/ie7betaredirect.mspx

Read reviews of it here: http://tinyurl.com/76kyl

Lots of people run with both IE7 Tor and Firefox Tor. Many people run with Firefox their preferred browser and use IE7 to have their 20 - 40 favorite web pages all up and running at boot. They all just stay up and any new web pages generated from clicking on an email link or from a widget news feed link are opened in Firefox and any links from your 40 web pages are opened in IE7 in the same tab. Using IE7 you can not rearrange your web page minatures like you can in Firefox, the Back button is not helpful now but may have minatures once it gets out of beta.

Firefox Browser

Firefox seems to be more efficient, streamlined, and faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer. For example, in one Firefox window you can load in at least 137 web pages with no loss or slowdown of the rest of the system (except during the almost 3 minutes to download all 137). Using IE6 most systems freeze at 20 and IE7 stops at about 52 at least on some systems. Firefox Tor seems to run faster than IE Tor.

Firefox and Tor are made for each other, literally. You can get the Firefox browser here: www.mozilla.org/products/firefox

COMPUTER INTERNALS

Belarc

If you install and run Belarc from: http://www.belarc.com/ you will see a thorough examination of your software and hardware.

SIW - System Information for Windows

SIW will give you extremely detailed information about your computer environment. Get it at http://www3.sympatico.ca/gtopala

CPU-Z hardware info

If you want detailed information about your CPU, Cache, Mainboard, or memory you can get it: http://www.cpuid.com

RegSeeker

If you want to clean up your registry, RegSeeker will do a good job and can automatically create a backup so it's easy to undo the changes if there's a problem. You can get it: http://www.hoverdesk.net/freeware.htm

Atomic Clock Sync

From the url below: "Our freeware Atomic Clock Sync utility can help you keep your local computer up-to-date with the exact current time. This program will reference an atomic clock server to get the current time with the greatest accuracy available and update your PC's information. It can even be set to automatically check the time once a day to keep your PC's time accurate forever. Best of all, you can download and use this utility at no cost to you! No spyware! No ad banners! No cost! No questions asked! So why do we do give Atomic Clock Sync away as freeware? Simply to encourage you to use and return to World Time Server.com for the current time in places other than where you live!"
You can download it and install it here:

http://www.worldtimeserver.com/atomic-clock

Tree Size Pro 2.2

Tree Size Pro is an excellent little program that will list the folders on a drive (or folders within folders) in sequence from largest size on top to the smallest size at the bottom. The picture below is a typical output of Tree Size Pro 2.2. Program Files e.g. is 6 gig and almost 30% of the drive and is shown in red.

To install it on your computer download the following zip file, unzip it and install it wherever you wish. Then bring it up and point to a disk or folder within the Tree Size Pro window and click on the little right button in the menu on top. Available on our web page at www.oocities.org/windowz4us/tsizepro2dot4.zip

Copernic Desktop Search Version 2

Copernic is an excellent file searching utility that can be used if you have problems with Windows own Search mechanism. You can find it here at www.copernic.com.

AM-Deadlink

AM-Deadlink is an excellent program to check out all your Internet Explorer Favorites. You can sort by any headings and delete duplicates. It will list those that are dead. You can download it at: www.aignes.com/deadlink.htm

INTERNET INTERNALS

NeoTrace 3.5

If you are surfing and your response is slow it could be something having to do with your computer or it could have to do with the current 'speed' of the Internet. You can use the Ping command yourself or you can use a nice little program called Neo Trace that will collect data for you and present it in a visual format. You can download and install NeoTrace from our Geocities web page:

http://www.oocities.org/windowz4us/NeoTrace_Pro_v3DOT25.zip

Once installed if you go to the menu and go to View --> Node View then run a trace you will see a list of all the routers required to accomplish the ping and the time that it took to get to each:

Map View will show your destination with a little yellow circle.

Speakeasy Speedtest

Speakeasy Speedtest is a program you can use to see how fast your Internet in and out connections are.

You can test your connection here: http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/

Display your IP address

Click http://ipid.shat.net/iponly/ to see your own IP address at this moment.

FUN STUFF

Google Earth

"Google Earth puts a planet's worth of imagery and other geographic information right on your desktop. View exotic locales like Maui and Paris as well as points of interest such as local restaurants, hospitals, schools, and more." The following is a Google picture of the Copacabana beach in Rio di Janeiro at 600 feet on the left and 6,000 feet on the right.
You can get Google Earth here: http://earth.google.com/

You can create some spectacular views yourself. For example the following is taken from 166 miles up looking down over the Swiss Alps and south into Italy:

Click here to download a 592K image of the above that you can use as your desktop image.

Yahoo Widgets

"Bring life to your desktop with fun, stylish, and useful Yahoo! Widgets." Click here to see a picture of a desktop of a parade of monks with 19 widgets on it including seven news feeds with a 238 pixel wide slide show beneath each news feed, plus four weather reports and a clock in the lower right corner. After a boot you will have to start the Widget Engine manually via 'START --> All Programs'. After your widgets are up always go to the task bar to bring up new widgets. After your widgets are up for a while, if the engine seems to be taking a lot of your cpu power, you can end the engine process via Task Manager without disrupting your widgets. Download the Widget Engine here: http://widgets.yahoo.com/

Satellite Tracker

This wonderful satellite tracker from NASA enables you to see 3D locations of over 500 satellites round the earth live in real time. If you click on J-TRACK 3D on the web page below you will see an image like this:

Note that each white dot represents a satellite in orbit in real time. On the real map if you look closely you will see each little white dot move in real time. If you click on a dot you will see it's name and orbit as in the above picture. If you click on any black space and move your cursor around you will see the earth rotate. You can get Satellite Tracker here: http://scisites.msfc.nasa.gov/realtime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3D.html

AudioGrabber 1.83

Would you like to easily turn your vinyl records or songs on CDs into MP3s so you can listen to them while you are on your computer? If you point Audiograbber to a CD it will go into an online database in an effort to locate the CD name and the names of the songs so that WinAmp e.g. will display the correct name of the song while it is playing. Audiograbber will then create and save a wave file or MP3 file into a folder you have previously given it. You can then play these files with www.winamp.com and other software. You can use AudioGrabber to turn any sound out of your computer into a .wav file or an MP3 file. The great codec LAME MP3 DLL is also available for you to download and install from link below. When making an MP3 if you use this codec try Variable Bitrate at the next to the highest nitch called VBR1, Joint Stereo and High Quality can produce excellent results. Yes use Normalize at all the defaults including Peak Level and Average Output but never compression unless you know what you are doing. An MP3 created by Audiograbber using the above parms will occupy about only 10% of the disk space used by the original wave file. You can download it and install it from: http://www.audiograbber.com-us.net/

Craig's List

Craig's list is a wonderful new free online method of buying or selling almost anything and it essentially replaces the entire classified advertisements you see in newspapers. You can think of it as one web page that contains the classified advertisements of about 100 newspaper around the world all available to you click by click. If you go to http://www.craigslist.com and click on one of the many dozens of cities in the USA and the world on the right side of the web page you will see many dozens of categories on the left side of the web page including housing, things for sale, services, discussion forums, available jobs, gigs, resumes, etc. Click on any category to get details. You can put anything you wish to sell in any city free. Buyer beware as usual.

Radar Weather Maps

http://radar.weather.gov will first give you a map of the USA with blue dots indicating centers of activity. Click on a blue dot near you to get a map of your current weather. Click on Loop next to Composite to get details of the previous hour. Great to see if storms are headed your way.

Other visual delights

Click here to see a short movie of an airplane trying to land in a crosswind.

Click here to see a movie of a very HEAVY airplane trying to land in a crosswind.

If you would like to travel around New York City virtually try: http://www.virtualnyctour.com/

To twirl around virtually in Napoleon's apartments in the Louvre in Paris, France click on http://www.virtualsweden.se/ then click on "the Louvre 360" then click on "napoleon III apartments grand salon". Sensational. Directions are at the bottom. Click here to see a 677k image of the following thumbprint that you can use on your desktop.

Other recommended software in alphabetical order

AVAST anti-virus
www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html

AVG anti-virus
free.grisoft.com/doc/Get+AVG+FREE/lng/us/tpl/v5

Bazooka Adware and Spyware Scanner
www.kephyr.com/spywarescanner

CWShredder
www.intermute.com/products/cwshredder.html

DeepBurner - DVD burning software
www.deepburner.com/index.php

Fresh Diagnose and FreshUI
www.freshdevices.com

Gmail, Google Email Invitations
isnoop.net/gmail

Google Toolbar
toolbar.google.com

Karen's Power Tools
www.karenware.com/powertools.asp

Off By One Browser, a barebones browser
www.tucows.com/preview/209043.html

Password manager Roboform will remember 10 login names and passwords free
www.roboform.com

Popup Manager, a very small popup stopper
www.endpopups.com

Skype, VOIP, call people for free
www.skype.com

SpyCatcher
Many people swear by SpyCatcher - it is free to test then costs $29.95 to buy and is available at www.softwarepatch.com/software/spycatcher.html

Star Downloader v1.44, download manager
www.stardownloader.com

Tinyurl, create URLs that will not break in postings
tinyurl.com

Webattack/SnapFiles, hundreds of freeware downloads
www.webattack.com/freeware

Winsite, 30 pages of freebies
www.winsite.com/free/freeutil

Download.com has tons of software a lot of it free, some free to try. After you go to this site you may have to use Ad-Aware to get rid of some stuff it leaves on your computer.
www.download.com

Tucows Tucows claims over 40,000 titles and reviews and is another very popular place to download software.
www.tucows.com

From here you can go back to the
top of this Geocities XP Favorite Software Web page,
to the Geocities Home Page, or to our other web page on Yahoo .

This is version 026 last updated on September 29, 2006