WindowsNotes.com

Welcome to WindowsNotes.com. Why not subscribe to our full text RSS feed, or subscribe via email? By the way, you'll only see this message the first two times you visit the site, and then you'll never see it again. Thanks again for visiting.

Like it or not, running security applications to keep your Windows machine running properly is just something that you’re going to have get used to doing. Once you get into the habit of doing it, it’s really not all that difficult - usually you can schedule it to run in the middle of the night if you’re one of those people who leaves their PC on 24 hours per day, or maybe you could just leave it running overnight once a week and let it clean itself up on that night.

Regardless of when you do it, though, it’s far more important that it gets done. And in this article, I’m going to show you how easy it is to use Spybot Search & Destroy to help get rid of spyware on your PC. The most common definition of spyware is software that gets installed on your PC, usually along with another application, whose sole purpose is to gather information on your browsing habits and send them off ’somewhere’, where the data gets collected and used in one way or another. Regardless, it’s not something you want running on your machine. After finishing this tutorial, please also have a look at the Ad-Aware tutorial which will be posted in a couple of days.

The first thing you need to do after opening Spybot is to update it, using the Update icon in the lefthand sidebar. That way you’ll ensure that you’re using the very latest definitions and increase the application’s chances of finding everything that it should.

After that, let the machine run its scan by hitting the “Check for Problems” button. This can take quite awhile depending on the hardware in your PC, but if you want to go ahead and keep using it while Spybot does its thing, it shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve never had an issue with continuing to work while Spybot was scanning.

Once Spybot is finished scanning your machine, it’ll pop up a list of the stuff that it finds, and ask you what you want to do with it. The safest thing to do is just have it remove all of it (which also happens to the be the default action). This is generally safe to do, which means that in all the time I’ve been using Spybot I’ve never had it delete a critical file from any machine that I’ve run it on. So hopefully you’ll feel the same level of confidence. After that, close the program and in about a week’s time, run it again.

You can certainly run the program less frequently than that if you wish, but anytime you notice your machine acting a little sluggish, it might be an idea to give both Spybot and Ad-Aware a spin. Chances are you’ll be very surprised at just how much stuff it finds in a very short time.

You can download Spybot from Safer-Networking.org.

Tags: spybot, spyware