Spyware, by its nature, tends to ‘phone home’. That is, it gathers information about you and then transmits it secretly to another location. The traditional way to combat this is to have a bunch of monitoring utilities or scanners to detect this, but a more advanced way is to simply gather the data yourself and track it down. A tool to help do this is Port Reporter.

Port Reporter logs TCP and UDP port activity on a local Windows system. Port Reporter is a small application that runs as a service on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003.

On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 this service is able to log which ports are used, which process is using the port, if the process is a service, which modules the process has loaded and which user account is running the process.

This can be an incredibly useful tool, not only for tracking down spyware, but for system admins to keep tabs of everything running on their system which receives or transmits data. To help with diagnosis or analysis, you can use the Port Reporter Parser tool to make sense of the data.

While this tool is not going to be for everyone, it allows power users to get extremely detailed information on all network activity on your system.

If you do not already have a utility to monitor your system’s vital statistics (or are just looking for another one), then a utility you might want to check out is CoolMon.

CoolMon is a free utility that can monitor (among other things):

• Processor usage
• Number of active threads
• Used/Free/Total Memory
• Used/Free/Total page file
• Used/Free/Total disk space
• Network read and write speed

Overall, like most monitoring applications, CoolMon does nothing ‘ground breaking’, but it does have a fairly unique user interface which you might be intested in. CoolMon works in all flavors of Windows so if you are in the market, give it a look.

As you probably know, your hard drive is the most important and fragile component of your computer. Since it houses all your data, your system basically “lives and dies” by the health of your hard drive.

Perhaps the most important indicator in a hard drive is the S.M.A.R.T. check which is built in to virtually all models. This check is a way for your hard drive to warn you that something is wrong. The problem is a lot of systems only show S.M.A.R.T. checks at bootup, which really doesn’t do too much good. This is where Seagate’s SeaTools for Windows come into play.

SeaTools, obviously, checks Seagate drives, but also any hard drive which has S.M.A.R.T. monitoring. This makes SeaTools ideal for systems with multiple hard drives as you can check the health of each device from a single location. Additionally, you can perform non-destructive tests on drives in order to full test their health.

While there are other programs out there which do the same thing, I have found SeaTools to be just right for basic hard disk diagnostics from the convenience of Windows.