P**y pop-ups!!

[zeb]

As many of you know, I am a total dimwit when it comes to technology so please be gentle!

I'm being plagued by Attention Spyware Detected pop-ups. Why is this and is Spyware dangerous?

regards....helen

[Simon]

OK,

Go here,
http://www.lavasoft.de/
download and install ad-aware, run the updates and then use it to clean up your machine. You may also want to install the google toolbar
http://toolbar.google.com/
to stop site popups popping up.

While your at it, check your virus guard software, if it's a bit old and tired try this
http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html
Its free and updates in nice small chunks.

Simon

[Autismuk]

In actual answer to the question.

Spyware is a program that runs on your PC without you realising it. There are quite a few legitimate ones of these (for example, Explorer, which does the taskbar and other display bits, and the little pictures at the right hand side).

Problem with Spyware is it can be quite malicious. This can be things like ; collecting information on your browsing habits and sending it to marketers, through rigging your system so it always starts at a particular page - which could be pr0n.

There are rumoured to be Spyware programs which will download child pr0n onto your machine (though I personally think it's #####, it's technically possible).

Even if they are not malicious they waste your system resources - think of your computer as something that can only do so many things at once, and the more things it does the slower it gets.

Sometimes they are loaded through Internet Explorer - the standard Windows Browser (chuck it and get Mozilla or Opera), sometimes they are loaded with freeware applications or games. Some users have clocked up staggering numbers of these programs running, literally hundreds, it amazes me that their computers work at all.

Popups are a bit different - they are advertisements popped up when you visit a website. They are *usually* harmless and annoying. The best way to deal with them is to run Mozilla or Opera, where they'll simply get rid of them for you, in Moz. first time one pops up you get a "Do you want to kill popups" message.

Also you get tabbed browsing, once you've had that you'll hate going back to the old browser.

Adaware is a simple program which goes through your machine looking for spyware and similar - and kills it off if it finds it. It is free, updates itself (more or less) and in my experience quite reliable.

The main thing to do is to dump IE, and don't run any program you aren't reasonably sure of.

XPSP2 is supposed to stop popups (Typical MS, years behind everyone else) but doesn't yet work reliably.