Download This: Remove Rootkits, Place-Shift Your TV

Summer's winding down; colder weather will soon keep you indoors again. This is a good time to beef up your antimalware arsenal with a new tool that will help keep your computer clean and safe through the extra hours you're likely to spend with it. You might also want to spend more time with your old buddy, the TV--but maybe you'd like to watch shows on your PC or laptop, too. This month, we look at an antirootkit tool and a place-shifting service/software combo that lets you watch your favorite shows no matter where you are. Both are free.

As if viruses and hackers and spyware weren't enough to worry about, we also have to protect against rootkits. Think of a rootkit as an invisibility cloak for thieves: It allows security threats such as Trojans and spyware to operate in secret on your system. Worse yet, the spiffy antivirus and antispyware software currently installed on your computer is unlikely to detect rootkits.

Fortunately, security companies are starting to clean up the neighborhood with rootkit detection and removal software. One of the newest is a freebie called
Sophos Anti-Rootkit.

I'm not a security expert, and I'm not equipped to put the Sophos tool through extensive performance tests. But to check out the Sophos Anti-Rootkit interface, I installed the software and then infected my test PC with the
Hacker Defender 1.0.0 rootkit. (I really, really don't recommend installing rootkits on your PC without good reason; they're nasty stuff.)

For me, the trickiest thing about using Sophos Anti-Rootkit was finding it. The software installs in the root directory (c:/ on most computers) in a folder called SOPHTEMP. In that folder, you click an application file called SARGUI to launch the simple interface, which flaunts nary a bell nor whistle. As it ran its quick scan on my test PC, Sophos Anti-Rootkit popped up the names of the Hacker Defender files. After a few minutes' scanning, it prompted me to delete them. Easy enough.

One last caveat: Like many security tools, Sophos Anti-Rootkit can return the occasional false positive. When I ran it on my home PC, it flagged a harmless Registry key that belongs to my VPN program. Should any security program flag a potential problem, it's best to make sure that it is a problem so you don't unthinkingly delete something harmless--or even necessary. This is particularly true in the case of rootkits and antirootkit protection, which operates at deep levels of your OS and may affect important system files. Check security sites and forums for mentions of the item in question.

For a more thorough discussion of rootkits and rootkit detectors--including reviews of several other tools--see Andrew Brandt's
Privacy Watch: New Rootkit Detectors Help Protect You and Your PC.

Ever wish you could watch your TV--not what's on the set nearest you, but what's on your very own TV with the channels located where you expect them? SightSpeed, a software-and-service combination best known for its excellent videoconferencing and instant messaging features, now lets you watch your home TV's programs on your PC via a new place-shifting feature called SightSpeedTV.

There are some limitations, most notably that SightSpeedTV works only with off-air signals or analog cable. To enable it, you must have a PC with a TV tuner card (either a Windows XP Media Center system or a regular PC with an add-in card). Then you need to install SightSpeed on that PC and hook up your usual signal source (an antenna for broadcast TV or your analog cable) to the tuner card and give that feed a SightSpeed identity.

To try out the service, since I don't have a Media Center PC or a TV tuner card, I chose SightSpeed's test TV from my SightSpeed contact list, just as if I were calling a person for a video chat. The TV content appeared in the same 320-by-240-pixel space--comparable in size to a video iPod screen--that displays a SightSpeed contact face during a video chat session.

An additional window, with the heading "Camera & TV Controls," popped open to reveal simple channel up-and-down arrows for controlling the TV (as well as grayed-out camera controls for the video call options I wasn't using at the time). The image quality wasn't as sharp as what you would normally see from the sofa, but it certainly would have been adequate for viewing a live sports broadcast or a juicy cliffhanger at the same time as everyone else.

The next time you see Download This, it will have a different look and voice. That's because Associate Editor Erik Larkin, a software enthusiast as well as one of our security experts, has graciously agreed write it while I'm on a leave of absence. It's hard to give up a column--even for a few months--that's this much fun, but I'm very pleased that he'll be taking care of it while I'm out.

Laura Blackwell may be no security expert, but she does work with a few. PC World Senior Associate Editors Anne McDonald and Narasu Rebbapragada, as well as Associate Editor Erik Larkin, contributed to this story.

Thoughts on these files? Has your favorite eluded PC World's Downloads library? To discuss this column with the author and with other PCWorld.com readers, check out our forums. You can also e-mail your comments to Laura Blackwell.