For several weeks (ok probably months) my son has been complaining that his machine being slow and I have been planning on rebuilding it.  I typically do this once or twice a year because he downloads and installs so much sludge that it’s nice to give the machine a fresh start.

So last weekend I decide it’s time to take the plunge but before doing so I decided to look around at his machine and get a sense of what he is up to.  I’ll tell you,  his web browsing experience was horrible,  it felt like dial up.  I didn’t know why the machine was performing so poorly but I had read about our Anti Spyware product in someones blog so I decided to give it a try.

I downloaded beta 1 and let it rip, I stepped out for a couple of hours and upon returning was shocked to find that 32 spyware programs were found on the machine! Some were rated as more critical threats than others but I decided that since I was probably going to rebuild the box anyway I’d just clean them all.

Cleaning took a long time, but upon completion I immediately noticed much better performance on the machine, so much better in fact that I didn’t rebuild the machine. My son is says, "it’s like getting a new machine". 

I realize that spyware can be malicious especially since my son runs as admin and he has basically granted unknown code the right to do anything it wants on his machine, scary enough.  But in this case none of the actual spyware programs were really malicious but the shear volume of programs running had brought this machine to its knees.  

Morale to the story is to run some type of anti spyware program as soon as you can.  Microsoft’s version can be found here.