My PSA

Thursday, 1:01 pm

By Kate

May

19

2005

Last night while the lad was out doing his Star Wars socializing and movie watching (they loved the movie, by the way!), I sat here delousing my Windows computer. Is that exciting or what?

Well, to me it is. Over the past few weeks, my poor computer has slowed to a crawl. It took almost a full minute just to open the stupid start menu. I knew something was up. Defragging only helped a tiny bit.

I figured there were some bad things living in it and that really annoys me—I practice a pretty high standard of computer hygiene and I have Norton System Works/Anti-Virus running all the time in the background. But with the computer’s sluggish performance, I knew some nasty critters had moved in somehow.

So, I updated my AVG Anti-Virus, Free Edition and Spybot S&D (free) and also downloaded:

CWShredder - You can find it at [www.intermute.com/products/cwshredder.html]
Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware - You can find it at [www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/]

I’ve seen all of these programs recommended in several other places and also on the AVG forums. They’re free and they do a good job of cleaning out spyware and adware. What one doesn’t catch the others will. It’s a fortified, unified front against the nasties. Viruses are bad enough, but the spy and adware are the ones that really slow a computer down to a crawl.

It took a couple of hours to do all the diagnostics and testing, but, lo and behold, my computer was chock full of adware and spyware. No viruses, but lots and lots of other uglies. Something to the tune of 90 of them. Where they all come from, I really don’t know.

Now, my computer zips along the way it’s supposed to. There is no lag or groaning while trying to open windows and programs. It’s fast again. Finally.

If you get the AVG Anti-Virus program (FREE!), you can also register (FREE!) for AVG’s forums. Unless you buy the pro-version, you can’t post to the forums, but with the free version, you can still read them and they are stuffed full of great information with directions on how to further protect your computer and get rid of the bad stuff. Really worth the effort.

They give excellent directions (How To Clean An Infected Computer) on how to prepare your computer for diagnostics and then in which order to run the above referenced programs. It seems to take out the bad stuff in layers so that the next program will find things that might otherwise have been hidden by the previous layer of nasties.

I’ve run Spybot and AVG fairly recently, but none of the 90 spy and adware thingies showed up. But by following the ‘How To Clean An Infected Computer” directions and using the other two programs, I uncovered 90 of them. Ninety!

Honest to god, I cannot believe how fast my computer runs now. So, really, give the process a whirl. It’s all free and just takes time. But man it’s worth it. I’m saving a huge net amount of time by not having to wait for windows to open and programs to load, so the couple of hours of diagnostics and delousing are a small price to pay.