This week: Scanning your pc for malware

The term ‘malware’ is a very collective term covering any form of software that once it finds a way inside your pc will have a negative effect on its overall well-being. On the lower end of the scale malware can slow down your pc or inundate it with annoying pop-ups, or at the other extreme it can render your operating system useless.

There are mainly 5 types of malware namely Spyware, Adware, Viruses, Worms & Trojan Horses. Spyware is software that covertly gathers user information through the user’s Internet connection without his or her knowledge, usually for advertising purposes, and Adware is a form of spyware that collects information about the user in order to display advertisements in the Web browser based on the information it collects from the user’s browsing patterns. Today we will concentrate solely on removing the first two from the list, these being the ‘lesser’ evils whose effects are mostly seriously slowing down your system.

Finding and eliminating spyware and adware from your pc is easiest done by downloading and installing specialised software that is known and trusted from the internet. Some are easy to use whilst others are more aimed at advanced users. These are the most wildly used trusted programs around at the moment :

Ad-Aware: http://download.cnet.com/Ad-Aware-Anniversary-Edition/3000-8022_4-10045910.html?part=dl-ad-aware&subj=dl&tag=top5

SUPERAntiSpyware: http://www.superantispyware.com/superantispywarefreevspro.html

Spybot – Search & Destroy: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/mirrors/index.html

There are others but the above should see to all usual needs. Copy and paste one of the links above into your browser (Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox etc) and download the program (from the Run or Save option it is best to Save to a file or to Desktop on your pc’s hard drive.) Sometimes you might think that nothing is happening but you might see a yellow bar close to the top of the screen saying “To help protect your security Internet Explorer blocked this site from downloading files to your computer. Click here for options ...” In this case click on the bar and click on “Download file...”.

Once the selected program is downloaded and installed it will automatically update itself to the latest threats and you can then (probably after a re-start if the selected program asks for it) run it to scan your system and delete all unwanted software it finds. All interfaces of the above programs are quite easy to use and self explanatory, most also have a ‘one-touch’ scan & delete all function.

Next Week: Defrag your hard drive.