Keeping Your PC Safe From Spyware

Broadband Internet truly has been an amazing equalizer, allowing mom-and-pop shops to compete with the big boys on Madison Avenue. It's also brought streaming audio and video, rich content, and almost-instant connectivity to friends and family across the globe.

It's also brought its share of pain to the party in the form of spam, adware, viruses, spyware, and other malware. It's a bit unsettling to visit a web site and then -- all of a sudden -- your PC slows down or -- worse yet -- stops responding altogether. Sometimes, your PC becomes almost imperceptibly slower or changes just a little bit at a time.

Spyware is the biggest culprit. It installs itself when you browse some web sites without your express knowledge. We'll show you how to rid your PC of spyware and how to keep it off, using the simple system below.

You'll first need to scan your PC for spyware. There are a ton of products, many of them free, that will find all the spyware on your system and report back to you how badly your PC has been infected. You can view some of the resources available to you at Computer Monkeys or you use Google to find spyware detection software such as PC Tools Spyware Doctor, Spy Eraser, or Adaware.

Once you know that you've been infected (and, you have, if you have a PC connected to the Internet via broadband cable or DSL), you can go about removing the spyware. Often, free tools will report the infections, but they won't offer to remove them unless you "unlock" the software to enable the removal functionality.

Our solution, if you go the free route, is to use at least two products, like Adaware and Spybot. What one misses, the other gets, and vice versa. They also remove the spyware that they find.

Once all of the spyware has been removed from your system, the next prudent step to take would be to inoculate your PC against future infections. This is easier said than done. The anti-spyware product, as they're commonly known, must stay one or two steps ahead of the spyware authors. And it's hard to prevent as-yet-unknown methods (i.e., new methods) before they are devised.

One of the best tools out there for blocking spyware is Spyware Doctor. There is a free and a pay version. The free version scans and removes spyware and it's highly rated, being chosen by PC World as the best anti-spyware tool available; the pay for version blocks spyware, too.

We are not aware of any industrial-strength FREE anti-spyware products that block spyware.

Now that you know how to scan your system, remove spyware, and block it from future installation, you can have the piece of mind that your PC will run faster, your home pages and other personal preferences won't be changed without your consent, and your personal information will be safer.

Bill
Blog: Spyware Killers

Web: How to Rid Your System of Spyware

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