If you’re a Windows user, you must have experienced situations with strange PC behavior such as blue screens, system lockup, fatal errors unexplained network and internet access, slow response etc.
Before you decide to blame your hard disk, RAM, video card or whatever else, consider the possibility that your computer is infected either by a virus or a trojan/malware before spending money on hardware. This is especially true for people who are connected to the internet for substantial amounts of time and who download software frequently.
Fortunately, there are many free tools available today to search for viruses and malware that tend to make way into systems from various sources including installing programs from unsafe internet locations.
Some of these programs are pure deadly in terms of security and install programs such as key-loggers that monitor your user-names and passwords on various sites and send this information over to remote servers across the world.
So, being paranoid about security is not a bad idea overall in todays connected world. It’s a good practice to change passwords regularly. Having a BootCD on hand and a regular data backup policy in place even for your home is a very good idea.
Here is a list of some of the free tools available to clean up your computer:
AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/2/us/frt/0
Spybot Search & Destroy
http://www.safer-networking.org/index2.html
Lavasoft Ad-Aware
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/
Trend Micro HouseCall
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
Microsoft Windows Defender
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx
No one product is enough to clean your PC. You must keep a collection of tools and get the latest updates online to be closest to clean.
RSS 2.0 Feed URL