|
Have
you ever had a time where the computer will start to slow down,
even though you purchased a fast computer? The problem might
be that your computer has ‘spyware’ on it. What is
spyware? There are several categories: Cookies just hold temporary
information—such as the items in your ‘shopping cart’
when you go to a vendor such as Amazon.com. They are usually
OK to leave, but some vendors are sloppy and leave things such
as your credit card information in cookies, where if the cookie
is improperly registered it might be read by another site. Data-mining
software tracks surfing habits— websites you have visited
and makes that information available to whatever website installed
the spyware. This information is then sold to advertisers who
match your computer’s address or your e-mail address to
advertising that they then put in banner ads, or e-mail to you.
Ad-Aware is a free program that you can download from www.lavasoft.de and it will help get spyware out of your computer. After downloading the program, close any programs that you are running (this helps it run faster) and start Ad-Aware. Once you open the program, click “Start”. If you have multiple drives, click Customize, then select Drives and Folders. Put a check mark next to those drives you wanted check then click Proceed on both windows that popped up.
When it is finished scanning, you should hear a sound showing that has completed the scan. Click next and will show you a list of what it found. I like to just check all of the boxes off. You must checkmark everything in order to delete them. Then click next and a prompt will come up and you will say yes. Ad-Aware removes them from your computer such that they won’t run by putting them into a ‘quarantine’ area. This is so that if you remove something that you later decide that you want to keep (such as a PIN cookie for the book-of-the-month-club) you may restore it.
I recommend that you run Ad-Aware once or twice a month or every week (whatever is good for you). With this program, you will be able to make your computer safe and healthy. If you purchase Ad-Aware Plus or Ad-Aware Professional, it runs in real time in a manner similar to an anti-virus program. Visit the LavaSoft site for more information. |
| Scott Preston is the Technology Administrator at the Ridgefield Boys and Girls Club www.rbgclub.com. He is the son of Bruce Preston, leader of Random Access and the Access Sig. |
|
Spyware
is often hidden inside of ‘free’ applications or utilities
that offer to do something nice—such as keep your system
clock synchronized with the naval observatory, or put a ‘fun’
cursor on your machine. In many cases it is installed in secret,
with no uninstall capability. Things get really messy when you
have more than one spyware program running at the same time—they
get so busy fighting each other that your computer has no time
left for your work.
Then click Next and
it will begin scanning. For large disks with many files, it might
take an hour or more to do a complete scan.
To completely remove
a cookie file or ‘bad’ application, select the item,
and click delete or press the delete key on your keyboard. The
harmful stuff is gone.