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I am a PC engineer at the easyPC company who has serviced over 2000 clients PCs in the last year alone. My advice is comes from my personal experience and previous testing of many of the spyware removal programs out there.

First of all understanding the difference between Viruses & Spayware:

If you are currently running a very popular virus protection software like Norton or McAffee and believe that your software will do the 'complete' job then you are completely mistaken. We have run a complete virus check on a particular PC and have found nothing. After the scan has been complete we have immediately run a Spyware scan and have found hundreds of Spyware infections on the same PC. This confuses the majority of people due to the fact that both viruses and spyware seem to be the same.

Viruses...

Some viruses are programmed to damage the computer by damaging programs, deleting files, or reformatting the hard disk. Others are not designed to do any damage, but simply replicate themselves and perhaps make their presence known by presenting text, video, or audio messages. Even these benign viruses can create problems for the computer user. They typically take up computer memory used by legitimate programs. As a result, they often cause erratic behavior and can result in system crashes. In addition, many viruses are bug-ridden, and these bugs may lead to system crashes and data loss.

Spyware...

Spyware programs can collect various types of personal information, such as Internet surfing habit, sites that have visited, but can also interfere with user control of the computer in other ways, such as installing additional software, redirecting Web browser activity, accessing websites blindly that will cause more harmful viruses, or diverting advertising revenue to a third party. Spyware can even change computer settings, resulting in slow connection speeds, different home pages, and loss of Internet or other programs

From testing all the differnt software out there the following seem to be the most popular
- spyware doctor
- adaware pro
- counterspy
- spyware sweeper

But the best by far is Spybot search and destroy by safer-networking. First of all run this program with the internet turned off and after a fresh reboot. When you do run this for the first time, dont be alarmed at the amount of infections that it finds and that your virus protection has completely missed.

After scanning which usually takes 20-30mins, spybot 'may' ask you to reboot and rescan. If this is the case then do so. The reason for this is because some of the spyware infections can not be removed at the time of that scan because they are currently running and need to be shut off to remove.

Once completed reboot again and you will find your PC will be running so much faster.

I hope this helps someone out there
Regards
Lee

You can visit us at the http://www.easyPC.co.uk

Great Links
http://www.download.com
http://www.safer-networking.org
http://www.theeasypc.co.uk/files Several free protection programs