Spyware Cleaners

As noted above, the Security Center makes clear the importance of installing firewall, antivirus, and automatic-update software—but weirdly, doesn’t even mention spyware protection. Spyware detectors are generally free, so by all means consider one of them to be part of your essential PC toolkit. You might choose one of these highly regarded programs, for example:

Current versions of commercial antivirus programs, including those from Symantec, McAfee, and Trend Micro, also include some spyware-cleaning functions.

Having a spyware cleaner available is especially important if you download a lot of programs from the Internet (this means you, file swappers).

Tip

Here are four tell tale signs that your PC has been infected by spyware: The computer suddenly slows down a lot; Internet Explorer doesn’t work right anymore; you get a lot of apparently irrelevant, nonsensical error messages; and the PC freezes up a lot.

These are signals that you should run one of those spyware utilities.

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