Test Drive | Data to Aid PC’s Health
By John J. Fried, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Mar. 12–The Ultimate Troubleshooter
Answersthatwork.com. Windows XP/SP1. Single license: $29. Multiple licenses at a discount.
No matter how long and how intensely you work or play with computers, software and devices, the frustrating truth is that you will never come to understand all that is going on at any given moment as bits and bytes go careening around inside your PC.
The deeper you get into Windows, the greater and more arcane its layers.
Tasks come and go unexplained.
Processes hum away, not giving you the slightest hint of their provenance or their intent.
Services, the individual components and utilities within Windows, and programs installed on the PC, do their work deep in the background.
Thus, it is always good to come upon a program — in this case, Ultimate Troubleshooter — that promises to shed some light on the computer’s workings and habits.
Ultimate Troubleshooter may not be as ultimate as its publisher likes to think, but it does go a fair way toward helping its user establish closer control over the PC.
Detailed information
Troubleshooter will give you detailed information about your hardware, including the manufacturer’s specifications for every device working with the PC.
It will provide the product ID and install key for Windows, clean out unnecessary files, help you set a Restore Point, and fiddle with some options Windows has obscured.
But at the core of Ultimate Troubleshooter stands a database containing information on hundreds of Tasks, Services and Processes that can run in Windows as the computer does its work.
Start Troubleshooter, and it immediately surveys what activities are coursing through the PC, then posts a long list of the Tasks, Services and Processes it found.
The real value of that list, though, is in the detailed explanations that accompany every item on it — including items that may represent spyware and other types of malware.
Even when Troubleshooter does not recognize something running on the PC, the program offers suggestions for coping with its discovery, although the best suggestion is that you should not do anything until “you have advice from someone knowledgeable.”
E-mail help
Someone “knowledgeable” probably means a tech-support person. However, Ultimate Troubleshooter also makes it possible for the user to e-mail answersthatwork. com about an unidentified Task or Process.
In my case, even though I try to run a fairly lean computer, Troubleshooter found three running Tasks, related to my ATI video controller, which Troubleshooter said were useless and resource hogs.
It also tut-tutted me because I had Norton Speed Disk scheduling running in the background.
The scheduler, Troubleshooter told me, could have a disruptive influence on the PC’s work.
Troubleshooter was also not happy that GoBack Polling Service, associated with Norton GoBack, was running in Services.msc.
The Polling Service, Troubleshooter admonished, could interfere with Defragmentation and ScanDisk, and should not run automatically.
Some kinks, though, make Troubleshooter a bit less than ultimate.
A handful of explanations are off the mark.
In lecturing me about Norton Speed Disk, Troubleshooter told me to open Services and set nopdb.exe to start manually, not automatically.
Oops, there was no nopdb. exe listed under Services.
And in the case of at least one Task, Troubleshooter referred for more information to a Web page that no longer existed.
On the Web
www.answersthatwork.com
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