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What If I'm Already Infected?You'll probably also need to have all of these tools available if your computer already has a severe spyware infection. Let's say that my brother-in-law just gave me his old computer for your office, and I want to make sure that it's free from viruses and spyware before you start using it. So, I go to the Windows Update site to install the necessary security patches and then install some anti-virus software. My anti-virus software finds a bunch of viruses before I even start looking for spyware, so I get this sinking feeling that I'm in for a long day. My first stop after the anti-virus scans is http://www.microsoft.com/spyware, where I find safe links to download Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy. As you can see from Figure 15, this computer is full of all kinds of spyware infections, so I select all of them and click Next to allow Ad-Aware to try to clean them off. Figure 15. A Badly Infected Windows XP ComputerThe cleaning process seems to have been successful, but this machine is so infested that I decide to run the Ad-Aware scan a second time. Sure enough, on the second pass Ad-Aware finds 32 more infections in addition to the 184 I already cleaned off. So I select all of these new threats, click Next, and repeat the process until Ad-Aware doesn't find any more spyware threats. Once the Ad-Aware scan comes back clean, I then install Spybot to see if anything was missed. Sure enough, Spybot comes back with its own list of spyware threats that need to be cleaned. What you'll often find is that if a piece of spyware is still in memory, that is, it's actually running when you run your spyware scan, the scanner might not be able to remove it successfully. Spybot S&D will give you the option to reboot your computer and to run a scan when your PC first starts up, before any spyware programs have had a chance to start running. (This feature isn't available in the free version of Ad-Aware.)
Of course, at the end of the day, the point of all this is that it's quite useful to have more than one spyware scanner at your disposal, especially if you're dealing with a heavily infected PC. But what happens if all three of these anti-spyware tools still leave you unable to fix your spyware problem? |
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