I had a very enlightening experience this past weekend. I
gained firsthand knowledge about which spyware checkers are
better.
As the result of a number of errors, my son and daughter-in-
law's computer died. For a couple of weeks, it had been
getting slower and slower.
I suggested running the normal solutions, defrag the hard
drive, add new memory, run the spyware checkers. They did
these but it got slower, until about a week ago, it finally
crashed.
Long story short, they bought a new computer and asked me
to work on the configuration for them. I took the hard
drive from the old machine and added it to the new machine.
It was then time to begin removing programs and files that
they did not need.
I began deleting some old directories and was notified by Norton that
some of them were Trojans.This concerned me enough that I decided to clean
the new machine.
I downloaded and ran the free version NoAdware (http://www.
noadware.net/) which identified and removed 5 programs.
Since this did not seem like enough to have caused the
original problems and slow down, I then used Spyware S&D
(http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html)
which found
and deleted 14 more problem files.
Since this was really beginning to get flaky I then used
the free version of AdAware (http://www.lavasoftusa.com/)
which chugged a while and found and deleted 127 more files
and programs.
The next morning, my son-in-law mentioned that he used a
'spy guard' program at his office. So I got on Google and
began researching spy guard programs.
Seeing that the Aluria Spyware Eliminator (http://www. aluriasoftware.com/homeproducts/spyware/
was the top rated,
I decided to run their scan. Another 97 culprits were
discovered and removed from that poor machine.
If you have not been keeping count, that totals 243
programs and/or files that I removed. This is a really bad
thing, but I think the worst part of it is that it took 4 different programs
to clean up the machine!
When we got back home, I ordered and installed the Aluria
product on our two computers. This has a nice scheduling
tool so I set them both to run early in the morning which
they promptly did. That afternoon, I decided to run Aluria
to check the results. It ran and did not find any problems.
Yayy!!
But wait!! Just to double check, I ran AdAware on both
machines again which discovered 27 intruders on my wife's
machine and 4 on mine.
Bottom line, so far I haven't been able to find any 'end-
all' spy-ware cleaning programs. To keep your machine
clean, you will have to develop a routine to run at least two
programs that complement each other.
The ones that I have chosen are Aluria Spyware and AdAware.
Aluria is scheduled to run each evening and I run AdAware
once a week.
The main thing that I want to get across is that it takes
more than one simple step to protect your machine and
information.
To make your machine as safe as possible, you need a few
good products: firewall, anti-virus program, anti-scam
product and a spyware cleaner.
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