Spybot Search & Destroy can help you with removing and preventing installation of spyware. I’ve used it for a long time and the program has helped me many times. Much has been written about the program, but I thought to include it here, since I find it very essential. It includes three parts:
- Main Interface to help remove and immunize (similar to SpywareBlaster) against malware and other useful tools;
- TeaTimer – to protect from unintended registry and system settings changes;
- SDHelper – to provide active protection against bad downloads in Internet Explorer;
Main Useful Features:
- Scans and removes various malwares;
- Provides immunization (which can be complemented with SpywareBlaster);
- System startup editor;
- Can be scheduled to do a system scan on system startup;
- Automatic updates of the program and malware database.
Excellent and strongly recommended tool in the battle against spyware. Of course using Mozilla Firefox also would decrease the chance of getting spyware 
.
I have always considered spyware much worse than viruses. SpywareBlaster can help you protect your computer by immunizing against known ActiveX based spyware, adware and other harmful programs. It works by creating special settings in your computer, so known harmful ActiveXs are blocked from installing.
Useful features:
- Protection against a large variety of spyware;
- No process to keep running and slow down your computer;
- Automatic updates of the malware database;
- Protection against ActiveX and unwanted cookies.
Overall a very nice and useful program. The makers provide regular database updates. The only very minor issue I have found is that when a new version is released the program doesn’t auto-update itself. Well worth a download and use.
SpeedFan is a fast and small program for showing and monitoring various temperature sensors on your computer as well as reading S.M.A.R.T. values from your hard drive. It can also read and monitor voltages from most computers. I use it mostly to look at temperatures for my hard drive, for which I sometimes wonder if it overheats. Very valuable to read the S.M.A.R.T. values to see if there are any cluster reallocation, etc. The tool is a must have.
Over the years (wearing my IT hat) I needed to recover various forgotten passwords for different people, so I started a list of tools that could be used to do some of these tasks. I will be adding to the list and updating this post as I stumble upon such tools.
Windows Password Recovery Tools
Offline NT Password & Registry Editor (Bootdisk/CD) is a bootable disk to help you reset a windows logon password to any local user account and can help unlocking a locked account. You need to reboot your system in order to use it and boot from the provided CD image. It works somewhat like ERD Commander’s password change tool.
LCP – User account auditing and password recovery. Supports dictionary, brute-force and hybrid attacks. Very nice program similar to @stake’s tool L0phtCrack, but free.
ophcrack – It is a windows password cracker based on rainbow tables. It is an extremely fast processing, even though it may not find the password and I had a hard time to make it work, while installed locally. They also provide a bootable cd, which is easier to work with…
Office Password Recovery Tools
Shatterock Database Password Sleuth – Helps you to recover passwords from Microsoft Access Databases 95-2002 (.mdb).
Word/Excel Password Recovery Wizard – This seems to be a nice one for recovering Word and Excel passwords.
BIOS Password Recovery Tools
BIOS Central provides some utilities allowing you to reveal BIOS passwords. Most of those are kind of complicated to use or DOS based, but I have not found any others…
Multifunctional Password Recovery Tools
Cain & Abel is a comprehensive windows password recovery and analysis tool. It allows decoding stored password from several windows utilities (like CISCO VPN Client profiles, RDP stored passwords, etc.). It can show cached passwords like dial-up, protected storage, IE7, wireless networking, and others passwords.
Cain also contains a network sniffer for a variety of protocols (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP, SMB, ICQ, TDS and others), allowing recovering network services passwords. The Password cracker can help you decode variety of hashes as well. It has many other features like recording VOIP conversations, revealing password boxes, cracking encrypted passwords using brute-force, dictionary attacks, etc.
Overall it is an easy to use software to help network administrators improve security.
NirSoft Password Recovery Tools are a nice, small, easy to use and portable utilities to recover password for different windows applications. Here is a list:
- MessenPass – Can show stored passwords for several IM programs (ICQ Lite, MSN/Windows/Live Messenger, Yahoo, Google Talk, Miranda, GAIM, etc.).
- Mail PassView – Reveals stored password from various e-mail clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora, IncrediMail, Outlook and Outlook Express, etc.
- IE PassView – Reveals passwords, stored by IE 4.0+
- Protected Storage PassView – Shows passwords and autocomplete information, stored by IE, MSN Explorer, Outlook Express.
- Asterisk Logger – This utility can reveal passwords stored behing asterisks in standard text boxes.
- Network Password Recovery – Can help you recover MSN/Windows messenger, stored LAN share passwords, IE7 Basic or Digest Authentication stored passwords
- PstPassword – recovers password from Outlook 97+ .pst files.
- WirelessKeyView – Recovers WEP/WPA keys, stored by windows’ Wireless Zero Configuration service.
- Remote Desktop PassView – can help you determine passwords, stored by Remote Desktop Utility in the .rdp files.
SIW is a system information utility that can help you find out all your system components and information about them. It can detect myriad of software and hardware properties and information about motherboard, chipset, sensors, BIOS, CPU, PCI/AGP, Video Cards, etc. On the software side it can help you determine software license keys, recover passwords, audit installed applications and windows components, reveal passwords behind asterisks, and many others.
SIW is a portable application, so it is suitable to add to and run from your USB memory stick to have it handy anywhere you go.
Spybot Search & Destroy can help you with removing and preventing installation of spyware. I’ve used it for a long time and the program has helped me many times. Much has been written about the program, but I thought to include it here, since I find it very essential. It includes three parts:
