Of Pop-ups, spywares and adwares!

I have a love-hate relationship with Windows. I have been using Windows from 3.1 era, and more than anything, I am so used to it and may be that's why I love it. If you know this OS, you can survive almost anywhere in the cyberworld. OS of the common man!

I hate it because of all the nuisance it comes with. First there were pop-up (lets not talk about virus, shall we? ...they have league of their own), and then adwares, and then worst breed of them all.... spywares. I always make conscious effort not to click on those pop-ups seeking permission to sit on your PC, watch every move, catch every password, and promptly report them to an online server. If not for the Google Toolbar's Popup-Blocker, we would have had 10 pop-ups per window by now.


I don't know how, but some spyware got installed on my PC this week. First I started getting a new toolbar on my IE, and then every time I searched for something using Google, I started getting 5 more additional search results popping up simultaneously. I spent more time closing those windows than browsing. I scanned the Installed Programs, and weeded out few of them(I was surprised to find them there in first place), and things became bad to worst. My IE started crashing with an exception the moment I started it. I went thru Registry and cleaned up few entries in \Run and \RunOnce, but in vain.

I decided to ditch IE and give FireFox a try, considering the fact that it holds 10% of the market share. I installed and used it for few hours, and I must admit that it had pretty good first impression on me. But there was a problem. Two of my intranet applications just refused to run on FireFox, and I had to run them every day. I was in no mood to live with two browsers.


I decided to fix the root cause by empowering myself with an anti-spyware. I was just searching for one, and came across Microsoft's own offering. It was still in BETA, but then who other than Microsoft know about their product's loopholes better? On second thought, I take that statement back. They don't! Nevertheless, I installed it, and took me half an hour to get to scan the whole PC. It works just like an anti-virus software, scans memory, hard-disk (deep down the folder structure), registry and compares every element with its signature database to come out with list of spywares on your system, with degree of their severity. It found close to 50 entries on mine, and after a bit of tinkering, I killed them all. Finally my dear IE is back on track. I am happy!

PS: I can't stop thinking about you, Firefox!