Computer Running Slowly – Adware & Spyware

In the article before this (Computer Running Slowly), I wrote about extra programs running in the background, slowing up your computer.

Sometimes, those programs are malicious. They may want to reroute your searches to their own site. They may want to spy on you. They may want to use your computer to send spam. They may pop up advertising. They may block access to certain sites. Or they may do other things you wouldn’t want, either.

Some of them even replace the advertising that you would have seen on a web site.

Why are they doing all of this? Money.

There is big money in Internet advertising, especially when it’s done the adware route. They want to show you ads with their affiliate links rather than the web site’s affiliate links.

So, they are doing badly to two people — you and the web site’s operator. Web sites make money from advertising, mostly from advertising where someone clicks on an ad and then buys a product. By replacing the web site’s ad, or the web site’s affiliate code, the adware slime can rob the web site operator of legitimate sales commissions.

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As an individual computer user and web surfer, that’s a more minor issue to you (unless the web site dies!).

Much more important is that, in order for the adware operator to be able to disrupt the normal flow of web sites, he’s installed programming that monitors every web browser communication — in detail — so he can change those ads he desires to change.

So, what can we as computer users do?

First, we have to recognize that this is our problem. Microsoft didn’t solve it for us.

Second, we need to install and run some anti-spyware/anti-adware program that runs all the time! We need to prevent the adware infections from occurring, not just try to solve them afterward.

Some of the spyware and adware in today’s world is actually installed at a very "low level" in Windows — that is, it is installed such that it actually controls and blocks (or redirects) some Windows functions, in order to hide itself. These are usually termed "rootkits".

Unfortunately, at today’s level of cleanup technology for rootkits, cleaning up an infection is long and expensive. Frequently, the more economical route is actually to reinstall Windows. Of course, you need to back up your data first.

So, what’s my message? You need to run an anti-spyware/anti-adware program that runs all the time. There are a few of them, almost all are commercial programs.

Microsoft offers their Windows Defender for free. Windows Defender includes both periodic deep scans and always-running functions.

I use and recommend VIPRE Antivirus Premium.

Lavasoft provides anti-spyware/anti-adware in their paid versions of their product Ad-Aware. And, many anti-spyware vendors are starting to build anti-spyware/anti-adware functions into their products.