Spyware Removal Tools Explained
All of this intrusive code can be a nuisance at best, or can wreak havoc on your system on a bad day, or ultimately can relieve you of your privacy. If the software was inadvertantly installed piggy-backed on another program, removing it can break the program you really want working. If it was installed without your knowledge or permission, such as in a "driveby install", the program may not give you any obvious way of uninstalling it. What's a user to do?
Fight fire with fire.
There are programs available which you can install to search through your system, looking for adware, spyware, malware, tracking cookies, anything which may hinder the proper functionality of a computer or give away your privacy. These programs are available as freeware as well as in commercial form. They are often grouped together in a category known as spyware removal tools. In this article, we'll introduce two freeware programs which have become the defacto standards in this category: Ad-Aware and Spybot: Search & Destroy.
Each of these programs is available in freeware format, meaning you need pay NO MONEY to obtain them, install them, and use them to scan your computer. Spybot is completely free; Ad-Aware has three versions available, one of which is freeware if used in a non-commercial role. Which one you use is a matter of choice. Seemingly, both do an incredible job of detecting spyware and such, but often I've found that one program may miss something which the other one finds, and vice versa. It doesn't hurt to download and install both programs! Unlike anti-virus programs, which run constantly in the background and can cause serious performance issues if two are installed at once, spyware tools (at least the free ones mentioned here) are manual scanning systems; when you want to scan a machine, you start one of the programs and manually scan a hard drive. The best bet is to install both programs, and run one after the other to make sure everything is detected.
