Your system may sometimes run slow if a number of memory hogging applications are running simultaneously. Also, the PC may slow down if a Trojan was working in the background. The same applies to viruses or worms as well. These malicious programs may work in the background without your knowledge and may not be detected by your Anti Virus programs.

The processes that work in the background can be found out by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del and then selecting the Processes tab. Here you get a list of processes that are currently running on your system including the ones that run in the background. The easiest way to eliminate a potentially unsafe process would be to select it and click on End Task. But the fact is that there are vital system processes running as well, and if you end any of them accidentally, your system may very well crash.

What Can You Do?

In order to find out what each process actually does, you can download Process Scanner, a small application that doesn’t even need installation. All you need to do is open up process scanner and start the scan. The scan typically completes in a minute and then it opens up the results page, online.

The advantage of the online results page is that, the latest updates are always available and any new virus or trojan is detected at once. The results page consists of a table with details about the process, the application it’s running for, its memory usage and more. Any potential threats will be flagged at once, so you can disable or delete that file or application it’s related with.

Why Use This?

It is not only viruses that cause problems to your computer. Some malicious programs may transmit sensitive and personal information from your computer to other computers. Since these processes run in the background, you would have no idea. Also, if you haven’t received the latest updates from your Anti Virus service, even that may not be able to detect the threats.

By using this atleast once a day, you can ensure that your system is safe to run. For an example, a common process is lsass.exe. However, a process called Isass.exe (note the I), actually carries a virus and may infect your system. When you simply look through the processes, you can’t probably differentiate. So, this can come in very useful then!

With Process Library, you can also search for names of individual processes and get details about them as well! Since the download is small and needs no installation, I would recommend that you go ahead and download it.

What do you think about this? Please leave your comments! If you are using any other software for this purpose, do let me know! Thanks for reading!

Firefox has a built in password manager that helps you store usernames and passwords for the sites you need to login and use. Once the username/passwords are saved by the password manager, you can visit these sites and login without having to remember the login details.

Recently I came across an issue with my computer causing it not to start properly. I was afraid that Firefox would crash due to the repeated restarts and sure it enough it did. But before it did crash, I made a backup of the passwords list so that I can use it when I reinstall Firefox.

Backing up the passwords:

• First, download the Password Exporter Firefox Extension.
• Install the add-on the usual way.
• Go to Tools ->Options -> Security and click on Import/Export Passwords to get the window below.

• Now click on the Export Passwords button. Select a location and name for the file to be saved.

• You can save the passwords in the XML (eXtended Markup Language) or the CSV (Comma Separated Values) format
• You can also choose to encrypt the passwords and usernames in the exported file. But the encryption is crackable if somebody else accesses the file and imports the passwords.
• Thus, you have successfully backed up your passwords

Restoring the passwords:

• Ensure that the the computer to where you are exporting the passwords has Firefox with the Password Exporter extension installed.
• Go to Tools ->Options -> Security and click on Import/Export Passwords

• Click on the Import Passwords button
• Choose the file (xml or csv) where you have stored the passwords and click OK
• Your passwords will automatically be imported into Firefox
• Not only that, it will automatically be entered into login forms into the websites without you having to prompt it.

You can also import and export the password lists for sites that do not save your passwords the same way as above. The only bit of caution I would like to add is to move and store the xml or csv file in a secure manner. However, if you were too worried about security you would not be saving passwords in the password manager.

I hope you enjoyed the post and please do leave your opinions and comments. Do share the post if you find it useful and thanks for reading!