Remove Spyware and Adware

There are a number of programs that access the Internet “behind the scenes” to upload information about you and your Internet habits to various companies for survey purposes. We call these types of programs Spyware and it would help your Internet connection a lot if you removed them. Adware gives you advertising in a window without you requesting it. Both of these types of software can bring your Internet connection to its knees.

  Some of these programs are extremely intrusive and actually change your Internet software and replace it with their own. If you remove it improperly, your Internet will cease to work. 

 You may try uninstalling them from add/remove programs in the Control panel. Not all of the programs are there however. KAZAA will cease to work but your MP3s won’t be lost. 

 I have found an effective piece of shareware that does an excellent job or removing some of the parasites. It’s called Adaware and can be downloaded from the Lavasoft website. For more information go to http://www.lavasoftusa.com/ ,. As always, use any software at your own risk. Aztec will not provide free support if you get into trouble.  

 Below is a list of some of the offenders. 

 Note:  For music sharing, avoid KAZAA. Try using  Limewire or Morpeus. KAZAA for example is riddled with 5 parasites and if you try a custom install and elect not to install them, they install anyway. Webhancer does the opposite of what its name implies - a real bandwidth hog!  To get rid of Microsoft Qmanager, a quality manager for MSN which sends statistics to the Mothership, Click: Start, Run, Msconfig, Startup, uncheck  LoadQM.