Table of contents

1. Introduction
2. Install and uninstall
3. Starting Privacy Mantra
4. Miscellaneous user instructions
5. User Plugins
6. Final words

1 Introduction

Privacy Mantra cleans your computer from online and offline tracks. It is fast, simple to use and free!

2 Install and uninstall

2.1 Install

Just double-click on the downloaded .exe file and follow the instructions.

2.2 Uninstall

Shutdown Privacy Mantra and uninstall it through ‘Add/Remove Programs’ under the Control Panel.

3 Starting Privacy Mantra

Start it from the Windows Start menu.

4 Miscellaneous user instructions

4.1 Cleaning

In the tree view, please select the locations you want to clean by clicking the checkboxes. To clean all selected locations, click on the button ‘Clean All’, to clean a specific location right-click on it in the tree view and select ‘Clean’.

4.2 Updating the database

You can update the location database by clicking on ‘Get latest’, it will then connect to the Internet and try to download the latest version. Please be patience, it may take a short while.

4.3 Manage Cookies

This only applies to Privacy Mantra Karma Edition. To enter the cookie manager, right click on ‘Cookies’ and select ‘Manage’. You will now get a dialog with a list of all cookies on your system. Select the cookies you don’t want Privacy Mantra to clean (click in the checkbox). Then click ‘Ok’. When you clean the ‘Coookies’ locations all the selected cookies will not be deleted. You may also delete cookies directly from the cookie manager by marking one or more cookies and then click on the ‘Delete’ button.

4.4 Command-Line options

This only applies to Privacy Mantra Karma Edition. You can use command line options to schedule Privacy Mantra to automatically clean your computer in the background. The command line options are:

-clean

If this flag is specified, the cleaning dialog will be displayed directly, and when the user click on ‘Clean’ it will clean all selected locations under ‘My Computer’.

-quiet

This flag must be used together with the -clean flag. If this flag is specified Privacy Mantra will not display any dialogs but run the cleaning process in the background without prompting the user first.

Examples of usage:

privacymantra.exe -clean

privacymantra.exe -clean -quiet

4.5 Schedule Privacy Mantra to run automatically

This only applies to Privacy Mantra Karma Edition. To set up Privacy Mantra to run automatically use the Windows Task Scheduler. Here is a step by step guide:

1. Open the Windows Task Scheduler through Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Scheduled Tasks.

2. Double-Click on ‘Add new scheduled task’ and click on ‘Next’ in the schedule task dialog.

3. Choose ‘Privacy Mantra Karma Edition’ from the list and click on ‘Next’.

4. Choose when you want it to run and click on ‘Next’ and follow the instructions until you get to the last page.

5. On the final page, select ‘Open advanced settings…’ and click on ‘Finish’.

6. In the advanced settings dialog, add to the ‘Run:’ field a space followed by the command-line options. E.g. ‘C:\Program Files\PRIVAC~2\PRIVAC~1.EXE -clean’ or ‘C:\Program Files\PRIVAC~2\PRIVAC~1.EXE -clean -quiet’.

7. Click on ‘Ok’.

5 User Plugins

Creating your own plugins for Privacy Mantra is very powerful. It enables you add your own cleaning locations. You can also download and share plugins that other users have created!

Requirements

• Privacy Mantra 2.00 or later.
• Knowledge of the registry.
• Basic skills in xml.
• Basic Regular Expression skills.

Editing a plugin

1. Open Privacy Mantra.
2. Right-Click on ‘User Plugins’, select ‘Create a plugin…’ and click ‘Ok’
3. You should now have the custom.xml file open in an associated editor.

Plugin Format

You can create as many plugins you want, each plugin consists of two different xml elements, TreeItem and Action. The TreeItem describes the actual location of cleaning, e.g. ‘WinZip’. Every TreeItem can have one or more Actions. An Action is responsible for how the cleaning is done.

TreeItem

The tree item describes the actual location, this is what is seen from the user interface. You need to set two attributes for a TreeItem, name and info.

name

Set name to the title of the location to clean, for example, ‘WinZip’ or ‘Yahoo! Toolbar’.

info

Set this attribute to a good description of what is cleaned in this location. For example, ‘This will clean the WinZIPs recently used archive list.’

Action

Each TreeItem can have one or more Action. An action tells Privacy Mantra how and where to clean. You need to set at least three attributes, method, key and subkey.

method=”DeleteValuesInKey”

This method basically opens a registry key and deletes values matching the optional regular expression attribute ‘valueFilter’.

key

The registry base key, the two most common are HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

subkey

This is where under the key values should be deleted. For example ‘Software\Nico Mak Computing\WinZip\filemenu’.

valueFilter (optional)

This is a matching filter for the values under the subkey. Each matched value will be deleted. If this attribute is not set, all values are deleted. Regular Expressions are used to provide a powerful matching scheme.

Example

valueFilter=”File[0-9]+” will match all values that contains ‘File’ followed by one or more numbers.

method=”DeleteFiles”

This method deletes files from a path, given a normal DOS search criteria e.g. *.log; *.* etc.

path

This is the directory in which the files are to be deleted e.g. ‘c:\program files\folder\logs’. However, when possible the path should be specified using environmental strings such as %ProgramFiles% and %UserProfile%. E.g. ‘%ProgramFiles%\folder\logs’. Some common environmental strings are:

• %ALLUSERSPROFILE%=C:\Documents and Settings\All Users
• %APPDATA%=C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data
• %PROGRAMFILES%=C:\Program Files
• %USERPROFILE% C:\Documents and Settings\{username}
• %WINDIR%=C:\Windows

fileFilter

Specify what files you want to delete under the given path, e.g. ‘*.*’ deletes all files, while ‘*.log’ only deletes files with the extension ‘log’.

Examples

Ahead Nero - Burning Rom

This already added location cleans Ahead Nero - Burning Rom by deleting all values under the registry key ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ahead\Nero - Burning Rom\Recent File List’.

Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 - usage of valueFilter

This already added location cleans Visual Studio 6.0 by deleting all values match the regular expression File[0-9]+ under the registry key ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Devstudio\6.0\Recent File List’.

WinZIP - usage of two actions

This already added location cleans WinZip by deleting all values match the regular expression under the registry keys ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Nico Mak Computing\WinZip\filemenu’ and ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Nico Mak Computing\WinZip\extract’.

Koffix - delete files

This deletes the logs of Koffix.

6 Final words

We hope that you are satisfied with Privacy Mantra, please don’t hesitate to contact us with your comments!

Copyright Codeode 2005