The Ultimate Troubleshooter: Handing Over the Keys to a Trouble-Free PC Red Means Stop, Yellow Means Caution... Joseph Moran
There's a well-worn saying that goes: "What you don't know won't hurt you". It's arguable if that's ever been true, but it certainly doesn't apply to today's world of Windows computing, where what you don't know most certainly can hurt you.
On almost all Windows systems, for every program you can see running on the Windows desktop or tray, there are several more whose presence are less than obvious. When you do uncover them — typically by checking the Processes list in Windows' Task Manager — the next challenge is figuring out where they came from, what they do, and whether or not they're causing problems.
Fortunately, there are utilities that make that task much easier, and most of them will effectively sniff out files that are blatantly harmful, such as pop-up generators or spyware programs that divert your browser's home or search pages. The Ultimate Troubleshooter (TUT) from AnswersThatWork.com approaches the problem from a slightly different the perspective — that a program need not necessarily be malevolent to be harmful.
TUT offers up the lion's share of its system information in three main tabs, one each for tasks, services, and startup items. Every running task may (or may not) also be a service or a startup item; there is a certain amount of redundancy between the three.
A right-click context menu provides different functions depending on the tab you're on. For example, right-clicking a task lets you terminate it or change its priority, while right-clicking a service lets you stop it or modify its startup mode. The startup tab for its part goes two steps further than MSCONFIG's capabilities, allowing you to not only disable an entry but also delete it, and even delete the file to which the entry refers.
Red Means Stop, Yellow Means Caution...
To categorize the items found, TUT uses a color-coded system based on a traffic light metaphor. Therefore, red denotes a program that's deemed bad — dangerous or harmful in some way. Yellow indicates a program that is probably harmless but may not be needed by the user, so deciding whether to keep or jettison it depends on whether it's actually being used. Green, not surprisingly, means a program is safe and almost certainly important, if not crucial, to system operation.
In the complex world of Windows, three colors will only get you so far when looking under the hood, so TUT can also categorize programs as blue or white. Harmful programs often use the file name of legitimate Windows system files in an attempt to evade detection, and so the color blue signifies that, based on the filename, a program could be legitimate but possibly may not be.
Finally, TUT flags anything it can't identify as white and makes it simple to e-mail a list of all unknown items to Answersthatwork.com for research and inclusion in future program updates. (They won't provide a personal response, however.)
Categorizing running processes is a good start, but TUT's strength is in the detailed descriptions it provides for items it finds. Whereas many similar utilities might simply report the publisher name, provide a terse and esoteric description for a file, and then leave the rest up to you, TUT offers informative backgrounders and recommendations written in a conversational and easy-to-grasp tone (though in a few cases the information borders on being too verbose).
Given that the goal of TUT is as much to assist in troubleshooting system problems as it is to unearth spyware and the like, most file explanations also include anecdotal information pointing out when a running process has been known to cause problems (at least, in the experience of the authors.)
