q+a Recently my friends have started getting embarrassing emails from me. What has left me absolutely confused is that I did not send even one of them. My life has become hell with constant phone calls from my friends asking me what I am up to. Please help me.

— Satyajit Sarkar

The problem is that your computer has been taken over by a bot. A bot is a particularly vicious malware that is on the rise. It is a program that runs automated tasks on the PC. It enters the PC when you click an enticing link that promises to clean your PC, or something similar. These bots do a whole bunch of dirty deeds, such as performing click fraud (fraudulent clicks that inflate bills of pay-per-click advertisers), sending spam, harvesting user names and passwords, and spreading other viruses and worms. In your case, it has got hold of your email address and has started sending messages at random to your friends from your list of Contacts. The best way to get rid of this is to download Blink Free Anti-virus software (http://free-antivirus.eeye.com). This will protect you from viruses, spyware, malware like bots and will prevent data theft. This software is free only for a month if you live outside the US.

I would, however, recommend that you buy Zone Alarm Internet Security Suite 2009 and ZoneAlarm ForceField. It costs about Rs 3,000 and you can get it from www.zonelabs.com. This protects you against viruses, spyware and hackers; protects your identity by blocking phishers and stopping keyloggers; blocks unauthorised downloads and installations and erases your surfing tracks.

Task Manager item

q+a There is an item called “svchost.exe” in my Task Manager. It is repeated several times. At times, my machine becomes very slow, rendering it completely unusable. Is it any kind of virus? I have an anti-virus called Avira, a freeware.

— Ankur Bhandari

Svchost.exe is a process on your computer that hosts, or contains, other individual services that Windows uses to perform various functions. For example, Windows Defender uses a service that is hosted by a svchost.exe process. There can be multiple instances of svchost.exe running on your computer, with each instance containing different services. One instance of svchost.exe might host a single service for a program, and another instance might host several services related to Windows. It is not a virus.

Format with no loss of data

q+a How can I format my computer without losing any data?

— Abhishek Gayen

Just go to Start—Programs—System Tools and click on Backup. This will backup your My Documents folder, plus your Favourites Desktop and cookies. Or you can backup all information on the computer and create a system recovery disk that can be used to restore Windows in case of a major failure. This same utility will also help you restore data that you have backed up in your CD or DVD.

Reverting to XP

q+a I use an HCL Intel Centrino Duo laptop with 1GB Ram and 120 GB hard disk. The laptop came with a preloaded Vista Home Basic operating system and the original DVD disk. Now I am finding it very difficult to continue with Vista for obvious reasons and thus wish to change to Windows XP Professional. Please guide me on how to get rid of Vista and load XP.

— Chanchal Mukherjee

The starting point should be backing up the laptop to as it was delivered. Most of today’s PCs and notebooks come bundled with a backup application that creates the factory installed disks. The idea behind this is that upon completion of the initial setup of the system, a backup application is used to burn a DVD or CD that contains the initial state of the system. That is usually done using some form of imaging software.

You can use True Image 9.1 Workstation from Acronis to accomplish the backup task. The product can be booted from and run directly from the installation CD and can create an emergency recovery DVD or an external USB hard drive that contains the complete drive image of the laptop or PC.

With the backup process completed, the next step is to downgrade the PC to Windows XP from Vista. The simplest and fastest way to accomplish that is to install Windows XP directly from an XP installation disk. Booting from a Windows XP CD brings up the setup screen. You will get an option to delete the entire partition or create a new one. Delete the Vista partition and use the space for XP. A format is needed to complete the process. The “quick” format works fine in most cases. XP formats the drive and prepares to copy the OS. After a reboot, XP completes the installation.

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