Washing Windows 8, yet again

Killing off crapware, specifically hpservice.exe.  This baby shows up in Task Manager as a "process", ie a program loaded into ram and running, but does not show a window to control it or observe results.  I tried to DISABLE it in task managers startup tab.  Did not work, when I powered up next day hpservice.exe was still running.  Net searching had told me that hpservice.exe was not a regular Windows service but just got loaded by a key in the registry.  So I started up regedit (more difficult to do in Win 8 than in XP) and searched for a key that said "run" or "runonce" and the hpservice.exe name.  No dice.  Could not find the desired key let alone zap it.
   Went back to Task Manager, and yup, the SOB was still there, big as life.  Some fumbling around and I tried "Control Panel"," Administrative Tools",  "Services"  And there it was, a service, set to "AUTOMATIC" start, which means load and run every time the computer boots up.  I changed that to "DISABLED".  
   I checked for hpservices in Task Manager this morning, and he is dead and gone.
   Moral of story: Don't believe everything you see on the net. 
   And, Win 8 works just fine without hpservice.exe.

Avoid getting Hacked

I'm talking about home machines or small office machines.  Big company setups, like Sony, are a whole different kettle of fish.  But for us home users, there are some simple things that will improve your odds.
1.  Turn the machine off when not in use.  It cannot catch a virus off the internet if it is powered down. 
2.  Never, ever, click on an email attachment.  No matter who the email is from.  Your best friend may have been infected by a virus, and virii, will use the address book in the infected machine to email themselves far and wide.  Attachments can contain malicious code that executes as soon as you click.  If you just have to see what is in the attachment, save it to disk, and inspect it with a low speed text editor, like notepad, or wordpad.  Word itself contains a powerful BASIC interpreter that can do all kinds of damage when presented with malicious code in an attachment.
3. Run a virus scanner now and then.  There are a lot of 'em.  Avast is good, and so is malwarebytes.
4. Run Windows Task Manager now and then.  Check the "process" window.  Processes are programs running on your machine.  There should not be more than 30 processes running.  Check out strange processes, or processes that seem to be taking up too much CPU time or ram.  Click on the CPU or Memory Usage columns and Task manager will rearrange the display with greatest CPU or Memory Usage at the top.  Google on the names of ramhogs or CPU hogs to find out what they are.  When you get a solid ID, such as "well known virus" go after  it.  Find it on disk and zap it.  Find any references in the registry with Regedit, and zap them. 
5.  Music download sites are virus infected. 
Good luck.

Firefox is getting flaky

More and more, Firefox is getting flaky.  Something goes wrong after some time active and it slows to a crawl.   Task manager shows firefox.exe and container-plugin.exe eating up 90 percent of CPU time, and hogging hundreds of K of ram.  Contain-plugin.exe is some kinda Firefox helper program.  In bad cases, Task manager will report Firefox is not responding.  And task manager has trouble killing off Firefox when he gets all bent out of shape.  So far after a lotta tries, eventually  the "kill" command works but it's getting harder and harder.
   Some Googling suggested  resetting Firefox.  The reset command is deeply hidden (Help ->troubleshooting info->reset. ).  It works, didn't break anything.  Didn't really help, I still have the problem. 
  Interesting side note.  Reset leaves a copy of your "old" profile after creating a new fresh clean one.  The "old" profile is 27 megabytes, which is a lot.  I can see how a single tiny error in a 27 megabyte database could throw a program into an infinite loop.
   Stay tuned for future developments.