exe

Last week, David R. told me about a program called Lop that was installed on his machine: " I've installed Lop on my computer and now every time I go online, an annoying browsing toolbar that pops up. Now I can't get rid of it! Can you help? " My ... Response: After some digging, I found some excellent resources on Google. A web site called doxdesk.com provided a very complete picture of what Lop is and how to combat it. http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/lop.html Here are some snippets from the doxdesk.com web site: Description Lop is a family of programs that set your start page and IE's ... (view more)

Dustin S. from Texas asks: " I purchased Windows XP home edition some time back, and have always had a question about some of the programs that it executes. The program that I am speaking of is scvhost.exe. I have tried to stop it from running but ... this just has the nice reaction of crashing my system. Any help would be appreciated! " My Response: The Pac's Portal web site says that there is a legit version of svchost.exe, which runs on Windows 2000 and XP; however, there is also a malicious program called svchost.exe floating around the 'net. The nasty version of the program is also ... (view more)

Last week's mind-numbing question was sent in from Jon W. He asked: " I have a few programs listed in my MSCONFIG startup . One of the programs was LoadQM.Exe, and Google's search pointed me to your web site. Good info on the LoadQM.exe program! ... I've now deleted it from the start-up file. The other two programs I'm trying to find more information on are Carpserv.exe and Nwiz.exe/install, but didn't get any clear-cut information on these two when querying Google. Do you have any input on these two items? " My Response:I asked the Infopackets Readers to send me their thoughts on the ... (view more)

Yesterday's Visitor Feedback of the Gazette addressed why two program files ( internat.exe and ptsnoop.exe ) might be present in the Windows msconfig startup. To be honest with you, I have never encountered these programs before. The name ... "internat.exe" seemed to me that it was a purposely misspelled version of the word "Internet" -- most likely misspelled to dupe users into thinking that it was a friendly Internet-related program. In all likelihood, I thought, the program name "internat.exe" could have been a trojan. I was right. Sort of. As always, I use Google ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader 'ZZ' write s: " Dear Dennis, I would like to know what the files "internat.exe" and "ptsnoop.exe" mean. I found them on msconfig/startup tab . Should I clear their checkboxes? " My Response: After searching for those file names ... using the Google search engine, it appears that there are legitimate Windows files (internat.exe and ptsnoop.exe) -- however, there are also files with the same names that carry malicious intent. In short, the trojan file Internat.exe steals passwords and sends them to the trojan creator; the trojan file Ptsnoop attempts ... (view more)

It appears that the last issue of the newsletter sparked some real interest amongst many Infopackets Readers (RE: tracert.exe and ping.exe ). At this time, I would like to address the problem that Infopackets Reader Stephen C. wrote to me about not ... being able to access any MS DOS commands from the command prompt under Windows. He writes: " When I [attempt to] run [MS DOS commands, such as ping.exe or tracert.exe] under the command window, I get an error message which reads: 'ping' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. Any ideas? I have ... (view more)

Tracert.exe? Ping.exe? What the heck is that? Trace Route (tracert.exe) is a DOS command line utility program that traces connection pathways along the Internet using the TCP / IP protocol. Ping (ping.exe) calculates how long it takes to transfer a ... packet of information from origin [you] to destination [a web site] and back again [to you]. What is TCP / IP? The TCP / IP protocol is a method used to communicate computers on the Internet. Any computer using the TCP / IP protocol has a unique address, referred to as an IP (Internet Protocol) address. An IP address can be thought of as a special ... (view more)

Whether you know it or not, Microsoft has a previous track-history for releasing sub-standard software that is known to be less than computer-friendly. What do I mean by "less than computer friendly?" Quite simply: either there are lots of bugs ... present in Microsoft's software, or their software has been known to make systems run sluggish . The Story Recently, I was visiting my brother and decided to hop on his system and surf the Internet. His machine consists of Microsoft Windows 98, has 128 meg of RAM, and is powered by a Celeron 600 MHz processor. Certainly, this system is not ... (view more)