Spyware and adware have become ever more annoying since they have become very commonplace around the Internet. Spyware, for all of those who don't know yet, are programs that are designed to track down what type of stuff you visit on the Net and then you get pop up ads related to those sites you visited. That's how it's supposed to work in theory. The strange this is that it never seems to work out that way. I get huge amounts of pop up messages daily about how to get rid of pop up messages (highly ironic, no?). Yet, before they came, I had never visited an anti-pop up message site or anything else like that. It seems that the companies that create these spyware programs don't care about what you actually visit. They only want to advertise their products in the most annoying way.
It's not just pop up messages or banners that make these programs the scum of the Net. They also slow down your computer's performance. Recently, I can't start up or shut down my computer without pressing the Ctrl-Alt-Del keys. The computer can't even do THAT on its own! It also does other things. It slows down the computer when you go on it (particularly as you go surfing on the Net). It can also freeze and crash your computer (in fact, I once had to reformat my entire computer just because the computer kept freezing up after starting it). If advetisers and marketers think they can make me buy their products using these tactics, then boy, have they thought wrong.
Spyware and adware programs are also intergrated into programs that are completely useless. For example, search bars that go to sites that have crappy search entries when you look for something. Also, some programs force your Internet browser to have a particular homepage and you can't change it. These sites are also very poorly made (I've only ever come across one such site that was actually useful; one out of about 15 that I've come across). I know that advertising a website is very important, but to go to these lengths where you literally FORCE people to visit them is ridiculous.
After a couple of weeks of being at the mercy of these programs, I decided to take action. Manually deleting files from my computer helped for a while, but I found out that they would just come back the very next day. So I decided to look around for some help. Apparently, I wasn't alone in my problem. Many others had this problem too, and they were contacting the Technology section of a newspaper I frequently read. From there I discovered the miracles that are Ad-aware and Spybot. These programs are were a great help at getting rid of most of the vile programs. After using Ad-aware about one moth about one month after reformating my computer (coincidently due to spyware) ....
