Spyware removal and general tuneup...

[JIMINATOR]

As you may or may not know, the secondary scum of the earth, next
to virus writers are spyware programs. These can do various things,
reset your homepage, popup unwanted pages, make multiple spam
popups, redirect you to other websites, make it impossible for
you to browse. One thing though, they will make your computer slower
and your overall internet experience suck.

Someone should really declare these things viruses, and then microsoft can
get off their ass and release a patch whereby browsers cannot be hijacked
simply by the act of going to a site

[JIMINATOR]

Please be aware that by following these instructions, you can possibly damage
your system. not in any major way really, but if you have additional hardware
you may lose the drivers for that hardware, which is probably an easy fix,
but something you should be aware of.

[JIMINATOR]

for the first step, you want to open control panel, go into add and remove
programs, and remove anything that you are pretty confident you did not
install. you want to keep things like codecs, device drivers, etc.
Some software, like kazaa, comes with loads of spyware. delete it all,
including kazaa. there is a kazaa lite version which you can get that is clean.

[JIMINATOR]

for the next step, kill all unnecessary processes press ctl-alt-del and click on
processes below is a sample screenshot of a fairly stripped system. you want
to nuke as much as possible, because any spyware that is running cannot
be deleted without restarting.

[JIMINATOR]

Probably a better program to use instead of taskmanager is process explorer
from http://www.sysinternals.com/ it gives more details about the processes
running and you can get a better idea of what is good or not.

[JIMINATOR]

get spybot search and destroy

spybot is at http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php

Update the definitions first and then run each. I think spybot is becoming obsolete,
since it no longer appears to be getting updated.

For running spybot, you want the advanced mode. Right click on your shorcut,
view properties, and delete the /easymode text

Once you update, run the program. You may need to reboot if there is a process
running that you did not delete.

[JIMINATOR]

Under the advanced spybot mode, there is a tools menu on the left. It includes the
internet plugins, activex controls, startup entries, web pages etc.

Review each item. Delete anything you are pretty sure that do not belong there.

Your sound card and video card will probably have installed utilities that are
running and are listed in the startup menu. Things like nwiz.exe, cthelper.exe...

You can type the name in google and search there, or try http://www.windowsstartup.com to see what they show.

Processes or startup programs with random seeming names are likely to be bogus crap that you want to delete if possible.

[JIMINATOR]

then it is time to get and run ad-aware.

ad-aware is available at http://lavasoft.element5.com/software/adaware/

download, update, and run.

[JIMINATOR]

at this point, you should be fairly clean. for startup intems that you
have deleted from the registry, you may want to go and delete
the corresponding programs on your drive. If you are worried about
doing that, make a folder, and drag them all there. Reboot, and if
your system works fine, delete them a week later.

[JIMINATOR]

Another note about things like realplayer, quicktime, realscheduler,
messenger. I don't need any of that crap running at startup, and you
probably do not either. you may want to nuke them from the startup
menu or disable the loading in the program settings. You can also
view startup items by clicking start - run and then typing msconfig.
this is a microsoft utility that allows you to make changes to your
startup programs. Useful if you don't have spybot, it shows other info also.