According to PC Magazine, anyway:  http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381528,00.asp

From: Steve   Sent: Tuesday, June 21, 2011

I’m fed up with Mozilla Firefox. I switched to it, but recently, it’s been that I can type faster than the program can put letters on my screen. There’s always [something coming up on] my computer to show something is going on. I go to the Task Manager and all it shows is Firefox. I have to wonder if there’s something monitoring my keystrokes and thus it’s busy. I don’t want to feel I’m just getting paranoid but this weekend, I couldn’t get into my bank account online. I called them up and they said that somebody was trying to get into the account repeatedly and they shut it down because of that.  I installed AdAware again and it removed some things, but that didn’t solve the problem.

Actually, this is a test to see if the same thing would happen as I’m in Internet Explorer. It’s keeping up with  my typing.   So, do you know of another browser to use that’s not Google or some other suspicious organization?

ANSWER:

Internet Explorer is always a good second choice.  If you have Vista or Win 7 you can upgrade IE to IE9, but it’s not available for XP.  I use Chrome a lot, but I understand your concerns about anything to do with Google.  That’s why I tapered off my Chrome usage as well as my Gmail usage.  Another good browser that no one seems to be aware of is Opera.  Mozilla makes another browser called Sea Monkey, but it might have the same problems as Firefox.  Safari for Windows is half-decent.  Here’s a list of several alternatives.

As to someone monitoring your keystrokes, it could be true these days.  Are you using Malwarebytes?  They’re the best, you just have to keep it up to date and do a FULL scan every once in a while (bi-weekly?) and a quick scan  weekly if not more often.

Something else you should do is to make regular backups to an external drive and scan that drive regularly for viruses with any antivirus other than Norton or McAfee.  ClamWin and Avira aren’t very good, either.  Microsoft’s Security Essentials is installed on all of my PCs exclusively, and it’s free.  Also, I recommend Acronis backup/imaging software.

Get 15% on Acronis True Image Home 2011 with MJJATIH15 coupon code. Expiration date: 07/18/2011

Transferring your Skype settings to another computer.

Hopefully, this still works six years later.

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This didn’t work transferring to a Windows 7 machine. The thing to do there is do an export/backup first from the old machine, save it somewhere, then import/restore into the new installation.

Haven’t tried this yet, but it looks interesting.

Increase Computer Speed By Running Windows XP In RAM

Mine got messed up somehow, and it drove me nuts until I found this:

http://www.jevon.org/wiki/Changing_Open_Dialog_Default_Sort_Order_in_Windows

UPDATE:  ”Only” problem is … the above didn’t work!  :)  Not for browsing folders through My Computer or whatever, anyway.

The way you fix THAT is to set the view the way you want in the folder you’re in, click Tools, Folder Options, View and click Apply to All Folders.

Several things to try, depending on what the computer allows and how far it gets you:
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• Boot the computer with the original Windows installation CD and do a “Repair” or “Reinstall.”
  • Do an online search for more detailed instructions.  Here’s an excellent one:  http://pcsupport.about.com/od/operatingsystems/ss/instxprepair1.htm
• Buy Acronis True Image which will create a hidden backup partition that is easily restored if Windows is bad but the drive itself is OK.
• Sign up with Nordic Backup to save your most precious files online.

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• Boot from a bootable Linux CD.  Several here (I’ve used all of these successfully):
  http://puppylinux.com/download/
  http://www.pclinuxos.com/
  http://www.ubuntulinux.org/
  http://slax.linux-live.org/
  http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/
  • Do an online search for more detailed instructions.
  • Try to find one that includes an antivirus program.  You might be able to kill any viruses on the Windows hard drive (through Linux) without attaching an external drive or taking the internal hard drive out. › Continue reading…

Well, I thought I liked this version 4 better than version 3.  I hated version 3.  But, it turns out, version 4 is no better.  It starts and finds things quicker (for me, anyway), but it ruins the computer’s performance the rest of the time!

• Remove it from your Startup group (Start, All Programs, Startup)
• Then run this from a Command prompt:
• regsvr32 /u "%programfiles%Windows Desktop SearchwdsShell.dll"

Create a batch file, naming it whatever you want, with the .BAT extension.  I named mine “mbamupdate.bat”
To create the file, just use Notepad or any plain text editor (not a word processing program unless you know how to Save As plain text).
The contents of this file are simply one line consisting of the following:
“%ProgramFiles%\Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware\mbam.exe” /minimized /runupdate /quickscanterminate
That should all be on one line.  And that’s it!

• Click Start, Run, type (without quotes) “control userpasswords”, hit Enter
• Click “Change an Account”
• Choose/click the account you want to delete
• Click “Delete the Account”
• You can usually choose “Delete Files” (but you don’t have to if you’re not comfortable with that)
• Click “Delete Account”

Some fairly universal keyboard shortcuts that work in many programs that quite a few otherwise computer-savvy people might still be unaware of are as follows:

• Ctrl A (holding down the Ctrl key at the bottom left or right of most keyboards, then tapping the letter A) = highlight all
• Ctrl B = bold
• Ctrl C = copy whatever text you might have highlighted
• double-click on a word to highlight it (usually)
• triple-click to highlight an entire paragraph
• Ctrl F = find/search
• Ctrl G = go to a specific line or cell
• Ctrl H = search and replace
• Ctrl I = italicize
• Ctrl K = create hyperlink
• Ctrl N = new document/message
• Ctrl O = open document
• Ctrl P = print
• Ctrl Q = quit/exit (not as universal)
• Ctrl S = save
• Ctrl T = new tab (in tabbed browsers)
• Ctrl V = paste (whatever’s been copied)
• Ctrl W = close window
• Ctrl X = cut (as opposed to copy)
• Ctrl Z = undo

More here and here.