You buy a new computer to upgrade, to get a faster processor or just a faster computer, a computer that probably cost you a lot of your hard earned money. Now let’s say it starts to slow down. A lot. What could do this? Spyware will do this. If this isn’t enough to make you go download or run your anti spyware application then I don’t know what will.

If you love to have hundreds of ads popping up while you are using your computer then please do not do anything about your spyware infestation, but if you hate it and you are getting a couple or even hundreds of ads a day, you should try running your favourite anti spyware program to remove spyware from your computer.

Please do not support this malicious malware from flourishing on your computer. This adware is a horrible creation and can ruin your home PC.

Your home PC is “personal” for a reason. To have someone else flooding your with ads or reteiving data on what you do is wrong in my opinion. Everyone should do something about spyware and remove spyware at the first sign.

Most people have no clue how to spot spyware, or recognize the symptoms. I will go over some symptoms that you might have on your computer when you are infected.

1. Biggest symptom is by far pop up advertisements. You’re trying to finish up your essay or you’re writing the last bit of your business proposal and all of the sudden… Party Poker pops up. Who opened this you might think. Your worst nightmare did, and it’ll do that 200 more times in the next few hours.

2. Slooooww computer. If you notice your computer booting up rather sluggishly, then you probably have some sort of spyware. It could also be you just have a lot of applications starting up at the initial boot up, but it will most likely be the fact that you have spyware. If you are me, it is anti spyware applications loading up.

3. Mysterious Search Bar. You open up Internet Explorer to check your email and you notice a rather ugly search bar sitting below your address bar. Who put that there? You did unknowingly. Quick Tip: Most of the time a quick fix is to just hide the search bar. Do this by right clicking on the grey space above the address bar, if the name of the bar is there, click it and it should disappear. This doesn’t uninstall the bar. To do that you need to go to Control Panel > Install/Remove Programs > (Look for search bar name and uninstall). If that doesn’t work, use Ad-Aware or Spybot Search and Destroy!

Hopefully by looking for these early signs of spyware you can join in on the anti spyware revolution and you can join in on having a fast, clean PC, free of any spyware.

Spyware can also be in the form of information collecting. This means that when the spyware is planted into your computer, it collects information about your surfing habits, the programs you use, even what you type. It can be scary thinking that something could be in your computer, recording all of this and sending it to someone you don’t even know.

Companies that make spyware usually don’t care about anyone else other than themselves. They use the spyware to exploit advertising networks. There are many advertising networks that pay people to show their ads, a spyware engineer could make a certain spyware to show that networks ads, generating quite a lot of money.

On the other side, the anti-spyware companies sometimes do surveys to see how the market is doing. One highly recognized company finished their survey with some astounding numbers, out of every 10 personal computers, 9 were infected with spyware.

Most spyware tends to be installed without the user’s knowledge. “Joe” user could be thinking he is going to download the latest version of Kazaa and little does he know it is piggybacked with a highly infectious spyware. Most software will present a very useful purpose, to “Accelerate your internet speed” or to “increase download speed” but in reality, all they do is pretend to change settings, and then infect you with spyware.

Generally speaking, spyware will cause your computer to slow down quite a bit. It does this because there is an extra process running in the background, the spyware. The reason they take up so much system resources is because they are usually poorly programmed and aren’t efficient, they are hastily made and hog your PC of performance!