If you have never had your computer compromised by spyware you either have not been using computers for very long or you a living uniquely blessed life. The rest of us know all too well the frustrations of Pop-ups, Misdirected internet searches, weird error messages, slow responding computers, and computers that are flat out broken due to malware. These infections are truly a cause of stress for many people. The topic of Malware encompasses all types of unwelcome software and is a vast, varied topic indeed. The one question that I do not think I will ever have an acceptable answer for is why do the hackers do it? I have heard all the usual answers; I just don’t know how some people can have such disregard for others. Anyway, that is a deep, dark subject that I am going to stay away from for now. Today I am going to discuss options removing the malware once your system is infected.

The first question I am often asked is “How do I know if it is a Virus or just Spyware?” The question used to make me chuckle but now I just smile and answer the question. The difference between a Virus and “just” Spyware is that a Virus can reproduce. That’s it. I realize that is a big difference but my point is that having either one on your system is a serious threat. It’s a bit like asking if I would rather die from a gunshot or a knife wound. I would rather not die from either. You don’t want either on your system. So assuming you are going to try and tackle the infection on your own, I am going to offer some tips

I would like to mention that if you are a high risk user, you should be backing up your system on a regular basis and be prepared to have an infection cripple your system in spite of your protection efforts. By high risk user I mean someone surfing adult sites or using file sharing programs. For the rest of us the products I am going to mention today, used and updated regularly will keep you system in good shape for a long time. Most of them are free and all of them have been used extensively by me. I have a computer repair business and I do install these programs onto customer computers so that the customers can keep themselves free of infections after they are clean. I have a pretty good repeat customer ratio but most of them are asking me to work on a completely different computer or at least a different problem when they call me the second and subsequent times because the anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are doing their thing.

First I will talk about Anti-Virus. Many vendors will claim that their software is the best anti virus software that money can buy. If so many are claiming to be the best, someone is obviously wrong. There are just a few things to know and try. Do not have two anti-virus programs installed on your computer at the same time. Bad Idea, they are powerful programs and will cause conflicts between each other. I strongly recommend AVG free antivirus. Even if you have an infection today, download it and let it clean up your system and keep it that way. Most of the time this program can clean an already infected computer, if it cannot clean up your infected computer try ESET Nod32. Eset Nod32 is not free but you can get a thirty day free trial.

Now on to AntiSpyware. I am going to mention quite a few programs. The reason for that is OFTEN it is necessary to run two, three, even four different antispyware programs to get all of the junk out. I can already hear the arguments that say If you would buy one of the “superior” commercial products you would not have to do that. I can tell you from over 15 years experience saving dead computers that Yes, occasionally, there is a really superior commercial offering, but often even the big boys don’t catch everything. So go with my suggestions, they are all free and you can have them all installed, there are no conflicts. I am not going to go into how to install or use any of these as that would take quite some time. I may add that information to the website later. But for now here are the recommended programs.

Spybot search and destroy. Make sure you download this from a trusted source because there have been cases of hackers putting out software that has a similar Name in hopes you will download the wrong thing. The reason they do that is because Spybot is that good. safer-networking.org is the author’s website try to get it there.

MalwareBytes – This is a very powerful anti-spyware program. So powerful in fact that hackers have targeted it directly. Sometimes after installing the program it won’t run because the hackers have blocked your system from running that particular filename. The solution is to go to the installation folder, rename the exe and then running it directly from that folder by double clicking it.

Combofix – Verbatim what I just wrote about MalwareBytes, even the part about sometimes having to rename the exe.

Superantispyware. Same story as MalwareBytes and Combofix.

I highly recommend downloading, installing and running CCleaner before you do any of these other things though because CCleaner will delete tons of garbage files from you system thereby reducing the time it takes to scan the computer with these other tools.

When you open a file it is retrieved from the hard drive and placed into RAM (Random Access Memory) so that the operating system can act on it. You do whatever it is you are doing and the data of that file is changed and usually increased in size. The system then tries to put the data back onto the hard drive in the same place it retrieved it from. Sometimes though it can only place a portion of the data back in the spot where it came from and the new extra data has to be stored on a different part of the disk. This happens quite often in fact.

The next time you want to work with that file the disk has to spin to the first spot and get the first portion of the data and then spin to the second spot and get the second portion of the data. Obviously it would be faster if it could just get all the data from the same area.

I have just given you an example using one file. Most of the time when you open a program or perform a function on your computer you are affecting hundreds if not thousands of files. I hope you are beginning to see how this can be a serious problem. Over time disk fragmentation can seriously slow down your computer.

Fortunately, this problem is fairly easy to fix and to keep under control. There are several very good commercial products available for Hard Drive Defragmentation and I have no doubt they are worth the asking price. The recommendation that I make to the customers of my computer repair business is to download Smart Defrag from iobit.com. I have used it many times and hundreds of my customers have told me how satisfied they are with this utility. I am in no way affiliated with Smart Defrag or iobit.com I simply recommend it because I have found it to be fast and reliable.

Here are the steps to follow:
1. Go to “My Computer”
2. Select C drive
3. Select the Windows Folder. (You may get pop up warning but it must be done)
4. Scroll down to and select the “prefetch” folder.
5. Go to the top of the page and select “Edit”
6. From the drop down menu click on SELECT ALL.
7. Now select “delete”. (If asked to confirm click OK)
8. Close out of all the windows and empty the trash bin.
9. Restart the computer.

Clean up the registry. Registry cleaning has a kind of mystical air about it and for good reason; make a mistake here and your system could become completely unusable. The maintenance and care of registries has always been the arena of trained professionals. That has changed quite a bit in recent years though and today there are quite a few good products available to clean your registry and even a few good free ones. Although there are quite a few registry cleaners software, I personally recommend the free registry tool in CCleaner. Just Google it you will find it. You may be asking though what is this registry, why do I need to clean it, and how do I do that. Good questions.

The Windows Registry is a file which stores all the settings and options for Windows operating systems. It has information and settings pertaining to operating system software, hardware, user settings, and every program installed on your system. That’s a lot of responsibility to put in one place, but such is the task of the registry.

The problem is that when changes are made to your computer such as programs being installed and uninstalled, user settings being deleted or changed, updates to software being installed, the registry is sometimes either not updated or improperly updated. When this happens the registry needs to be cleaned so that your computer can run quickly and efficiently.

How do you clean it? As I stated before, you should download and install CCleaner and then use the registry tool to perform the cleaning. This program has been used by me hundreds of times as well as by hundreds of my customers and I can attest to its effectiveness and safety. I am not affiliated with CCleaner in any way, the customers I refer to are from my computer repair business.

Our first step is to find out which programs are auto starting. One source of information is your notification area. That is the section of your desktop where your clock is; in the lower right corner for most of us. All those icons in there represent programs that are running. Not all running programs are shown here though. We need a tool to show us all the programs that are auto starting. I am going to take a huge risk here and make a recommendation. CCleaner. Please read to the end of this page for my explanation of the risk. Google CCleaner or go to www.ccleaner.com, download it, install it, and then click on the tools icon on the upper left side, and click startup. This will show you all the programs that start when you turn on your computer. Don’t be alarmed, we can get rid of most of them.

Now that we have identified the AutoStart programs, which ones can we get rid of and how do we do that? We can get rid of almost all of them. Look under the column labeled “file”. A simple rule of thumb is that anything that starts with “c:\pro…..” is safe to disable, however if the entry starts with “c:\windows” or just has a filename you will want to leave it alone until you research that specific entry. Now, just because it is safe to disable the entries that begin “c:\pro” does not always mean that you will want to, it may be a program that you actually like and want to have start every time you boot up. For example many people want their yahoo messenger to start.

So it really is as simple as that, use the startup tool in CCleaner to find and disable startup programs. Why then did I say it was a risk to recommend that? I have found over the years, that making recommendations about software is always a risky proposition because someone is going to think your recommendation stinks and they have a better one. Or someone will follow your recommendation and they happen to be that one in a million who has some issue that causes the process not to work right.

I am not affiliated with CCleaner in any way; however, I have seen it used successfully by hundreds of the clients of my computer repair business. My clients to whom I recommend this tool tell me, and I agree that the startup tool included with CCleaner is extremely useful. It is user friendly and uncomplicated. It is straight forward and does what it is designed to do. Yes there are other ways to do the job, but this is a simple, effective, non-technical method that can be used by nearly everyone.

That’s right; pride has caused most software companies to produce software that starts up every time you turn on your computer. They offer a few reasonable sounding explanations, but on further examination these explanations don’t hold up.

One “reason” for these AutoStart programs is so that the software can automatically update. Sounds good but most commercial software is not often updated; the vendor usually has stated working on a completely different version even before you bought this one. If you are downloading a program it is usually the latest version and if you buy it from a store the installation program should look for updates during the install process. An important exception is your security software but that is a no-brainer always leave it set to run on startup.

Another “reason” given for having programs AutoStart is that they will then run in the background and be ready for you instantly when you need them. That whole theory is a farce because do you want to wait for the program to load every time you start your computer or do you want to wait for the program to load when you want to use the program. You are going to wait for it one way or another. Another problem with this approach is that your computer has only so much memory to run programs, if you have a bunch of them running in the background you will not have any memory left to run them in the foreground. Your computer is going to run slow all around because of the background programs.

So yes your computer probably is taking longer to start up than it used to, but it is not the computers fault. It is the fault of prideful software developers. There are a number of things you can do to fix the problem. Some address the problem head on and others compensate for the problem. My advice is to use all of the suggested measures and you are sure to have not only a faster booting computer but one that runs faster overall as well.