The Internet is probably the greatest tool ever for fixing stuff. A search for "how to..." make, build, bake, sew or fix something is a shining microcosmic realization of the visions for hypermedia. Thanks for that mssrs. Wilson and Berners-Lee. And thanks to the empowering visions of all the web indexing and search engine evolvers that made it so we can quickly reach into the hypermediaverse and pull out whatever it is we need.
Unfortunately, sometimes there's just too much information noise in those search engines and it gets to be nearly impossible to dig through that infonoise to find what you need. A prime example of infonoise comes when one is trying to find the purpose of some obscure bit of software that's been found burrowed into a troubled computer. And it's all thanks to a noise generating monster called "HijackThis" or "HJT".
HijackThis is a sometimes useful tool for listing all the things that might have attached themselves to your computer or, more particularly, to your web browser. Thousands of helpful techies have been asking many more thousands of forlorn computer users to run HJT on their ailing computers and then post the results on a zillion ad hoc help forums across the web.
While the resulting HJT logs may or may not contain anything that has anything to do with the problem of the moment, a result of posting these logs on the web is an enormous fog of unuseful, obfuscating and frustrating noise that interferes with searches to find out simply what some piece of software is, who made it and what it is for.
So; having just spent, for the umpteenth time, a quarter hour or so trying to get passed the HJT fog, with this first entry, I'm going to start a list of things I've had to spend too much time just trying to find out "What Is:...?".
Mike's What Is List:
- sprtsvc_ddoctorv2
- This is the "SupportSoft Sprocket Service". It was installed by software called "Desktop Doctor" used by Comcast to remotely "service" computers. If you're getting errors thrown by this service, uninstall every program with "Comcast" &/or with "Desktop Doctor" in its name.
