After reading an article on spyware removal over at Coding Horror I realized I hadn't checked out things on my home PC in a while, and had not installed anything new since my error-filled experience installing Gramps.
Here's a list of tools I have recently found useful:
Process Explorer from Sysinternals. This neat little program will run without being installed, and is much more informative than Windows Task Manager.
Here's a screen shot:
You will see a list similar to Task Manager's, but so much more informative with file descriptions and company names. If that isn't enough, an option to search on-line is included which will load it up in your browser. YOu can select to have it run in place of Task Manager, and can emulate many of Task Managers options. It does not recognize when it is already being run however, so if you do minimize it and hide it, if you forget you are running it already you could spawn several processes. Paired with Sysinternals' Autoruns, you can really inspect what is loading and running on your PC. Both have the option to search online for the item, which will load it up in your default browser, and Autoruns will let you jump from it's file display to the corresponding display in Process Explorer.
I think everyone should have decent hard disk recovery tools. Sometimes Windows System Restore just isn't an option. Unfortunately, my litmus test for these has been whether I was able to recover my hard drive data from from failing drives. Sadly that has yet to occur, but that may never happen. Here's a list of things I tried at various times to access the drive partitions with varying levels of success. These are gathered from numerous forums, blog posts, and other resources. Some are imaging software, others boot recovery. It's been a while since I tried them, so I only provide the list here of things I tried without reviewing them.
Dubaron DiskImage (strangely enough it has a project named "Visual Synapse" which is very close to my PHP database project SynAps. Neither of which have very much to do with what a synapse actually is - heh).
PC Inspector File Recovery - a UK product.
Active Partition Recovery - which as I recall came closest to actually getting the drive accessed.
Acronis Disk Director Suite. Only tried demo. Costs $49.99, but does support Vista now.
Undisker. Also demo version.
Ubuntu Live CD
Puppy Linux
Lastly, I just finished installing Cygwin, a Linux emulation for Windows. I'm anxious to get some packages on there such as KDE and gnome and use some other apps that haven't ported to windows yet. After my hard drive failure, you're probably wondering why I didn't just wipe the drives and put Linux on it. I really wanted to, but I needed some of my old Windows Aps and since I'm a creature of habit, it was 'easier' (although not painless) to revert back to my default factory installation and upgrade everything. I still have the toasted hard drive that I am thinking of turning into a Linux box.
