Computer slowing up? Pop ups got you down? Download Ad Aware! I started out the other night on Liz's computer, which hadn't been virus protected in the four years she's had it. After exposure to college dorm ethernet, internet in Japan, and now broadband at home, her computer had become a veritable hornet's next of spyware, malware, and just all sorts of nasty critters. One sweep of Ad-Aware found over 500 items that shouldn't be there, like active spyware and popup programs in her memory and even worse all sorts of trash in her registry. Now... clean as a whistle! I did the same thing with my GM computer, which is supposed to be swept for all these things with expensive enterprise wide virus scans, etc... 250+ Items. It also got rid of this annoying Internet Optimizer code that hijacked my IE error screen, so every time I went to an internet it couldn't find, I got sent to a "search" screen that was a popup nightmare. This was especially annoying b/c, with a wireless connection, you tend to get knocked off sometimes and that error screen comes up a lot.
But, the real test was on my home computer, which had a corrupt registry that was preventing me from loading Internet Explorer at all. After a year of not being able to use IE... BAM, it was up and running in no time and gone were the over 600 critters that shouldn't have been there. This program is sweet, and you should get it.