I’ve said it a lot but it bears repeating: you can ditch the need for a lot of these downloads by surfing safely.

I’m fairly sure to be ignored but my experience bears this out. If you use a fast, no-nonsense browser like Opera, turn off javascript, cookies, and `forget’ to install Flash, you’ll be in pretty good shape.

I have run Spybot and Ad-Aware forever. I stopped using Ad-Aware last year because it never caught anything. Understand that it never caught anything because I never gave it anything to catch. By disabling the above and scrupulously avoiding Internet Explorer, there was no adware/spyware/malware to remove.

Spybot is a very useful tool, especially the Tea Timer portion. This is essentially an inquisitive firewall which allows very fine control over what happens in your computer. Unfortunately people tend to treat it like Vista’s UAC and just say yes to everything, defeating the purpose of the utility.

You can achieve similar results using Firefox. You may even be able to find enough nails and glue to harden IE but I don’t have enough time or energy to try. You can also use a Mac or linux to keep things clean.

Unfortunately people don’t take the time to understand this and are more concerned with a `Graphical Browsing Experience’, so they wind up with all sorts of grief in their systems.

Stop liying about thim scam, it will scan for free but will not remove any adwares until you pay.
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