Is Spyware Slowing Your Computer Down To A Crawl?
By George Peirson

Everyday more and more computers are becoming infected with
Spyware and Adware (advertising tracking). No matter where you
go on the web, someone is trying to sneak something on your
computer. From honest web sites placing simple logon cookies,
to paid advertising tracking your movements on the web, to
malicious software that is designed to record your keystrokes
and discover your passwords, Spyware and Adware have together
become the web’s number one problem.

Many of these programs are down right dangerous and seriously
threaten your online privacy and identity. But even the simple
and supposedly benign Adware programs can cause you serious
problems.

Spyware is any program that installs itself onto your computer
with the intent to spy on your activity. This can be recording
your online searching habits, or whatever you type on your
keyboard. Adware is not much better. It is designed to watch
what you do online, where you go, which terms you search for
and then report this to the ad agency that runs the adware
program.

Adware programs may be designed with the best intentions in
mind, but even these can cause your computer serious problems.

Here is what happens. Many, if not most, advertisers on the
internet will try and place a cookie or other small program on
your computer. Many will add code that will track that cookie
as it hits different pages. The code may be designed simply to
gather anonymous data, or it may be trying to send ads to your
browser that the advertising company thinks you will be more
likely to respond to.

Whatever the case, the Adware or Spyware is using your computer
to do its tracking. This means that part of your computer’s
power and CPU cycles are being diverted away from the activity
you are trying to perform. Your computer is being used by
someone else instead to track your movements. Now, when we
multiply this behavior by tens or hundreds of Adware or Spyware
programs all trying to use your computer for their work you can
begin to see the problem.

These programs can literally slow your computer down to a
crawl, or make it crash altogether. They can fill your computer
up with trash files, open unwanted popup windows, use up the
space in your internet cache and generally just make working on
your computer a nightmare.

Luckily there are several easy solutions to the problem. But
first let me make one distinction, Spyware and Adware are not
the same thing as a computer virus. Although a computer virus
can install spyware on a computer, you will need different
tools to remove a computer virus and to keep your system clean
from Spyware and Adware. You should be using both a high
quality commercial anti-virus program and one or more good
quality programs for handling the spyware/adware problem.

There are several good Spyware/adware programs on the market. I
use two different programs on my network, Ad-aware from Lavasoft
and Spy Sweeper from Webroot Software although there are several
others. You can easily find both of these by doing an internet
search for Ad-aware and Spy Sweeper. Or simply do a search for
spyware. Both of these programs will scan your hard drives and
registry and present you with a list of spyware/adware programs
hiding on your system. You can then quarantine or remove the
offending programs. I use both of these programs since neither
one seems to catch everything. Plus I will run them 2 or more
times in a row, the nastier spyware will not be completely
removed on the first pass.

The process is very easy and I recommend running these programs
at least once a week and every time you have been doing some
extended web surfing. You will be surprised at how many of
these spyware/adware programs will sneak onto your system. I
run a very clean network and I have yet to scan my system and
not come up with at least a few of these hiding on my hard
drive.

So be aware of the problem, take reasonable precautions, scan
your system frequently, and the spyware/adware curse can be
broken.

Copyright 2005 - George Peirson

About the Author: George Peirson is a successful Entrepreneur,
Internet Trainer and author of over 30 multimedia based
tutorial training titles. Read more articles by George Peirson
at www.howtogurus.com/free-articles.html

Source: http://www.isnare.com
 

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