my name is mwd

Whilst I was at my parents’ house this weekend, I thought I’d have a look at their PC, as my brother was complaining it was slow. It’s not the fastest of machines (though, neither is my 1999 vintage G3 :), but I’d used it before and knew it shouldn’t be that sluggish. IIRC It’s a Compaq PII of some description running Windows 98. First I tried disabling all the programs that had decided to insist they be launched on start up and sit there quitely in the system tray consuming memory. This had little performance effect, but did seem to cause the Active Desktop to crash on boot up. Joy. This was solved by simply turning active desktop off, as they weren’t using it anyway. But it still was thrashing like mad.

It was at this point, two things came to my attention: 1) when I used google to search for stuff another browser window would pop up with searches from some other search company (not one I’d heard of), and when I said this to my brother he said that they’d get random pop-ups every few minutes. Ahhh, looks like something nasty at work here. I’ve not had a Windows machine for many years now, using Linux for several years before moving over to Mac OS X. This has meant I’ve led a nice sheltered life, unaware of the amount of crudware that Windows users, particularly those with older versions of Windows and those that use Internet Explorer, have to suffer. Wonderful software that will sit on your machine and provided wonderful services, such as constant pop-up ads, or monitor your activity or whatever. Crud.

I did a little research on places like Ars Technica to find recommendations on removing all this ad-ware/spy-ware stuff. The first less, it seems that if you simply google for remover programs, a lot of them that offer such services actually install more spyware. So, I went for something that people on Ars (who are a reasonably technical bunch, and are a good source of info for such occasions) seemed to recommend, the below linked Ad-Aware. This will look for processes, registry entries, and files that are linked with known crudware, and let you remove them. The basic version is free, and lets you perform scans and removals, and there are also two pay versions, which are more pro-active and will try and prevent you getting this crud in teh first place.

Anyway, I plonked for the free version, and ran the scan, which discovered around 500 dubious objects, including two running programs. Nasty. But a flush, a reboot, and another flush (ad-aware needed to reboot to wrestle permission to delete some files), and the system was reported clean, and definitely ran a lot faster, back to how I remebering it running. Most of the files seemed to be tracker cookiers, which were also blew away. Anyway, I was impressed, and if you’re worried about this sort of thing, the I can recommend ad-aware, it certainly seems to do a reasonable job.

This is, of course, another instance of the sheer ignorance at which Microsoft approached the Internet. They seemed to have focussed on the “wouldn’t it be creally cool if we could do x?”, which is a great thing - all us users want cool stuff - but in their rush to release the security issues didn’t get thought through. In their rush to bring a computer to teh desktop of everyhome, they gave people with less computer experience a wide open box, and these people (very reasonably) will occasionaly click that “yes” button. Even people that are used to computers will get duped because those out to get you on the Internet are putting more energy and time into it than those who rarely give it much though in their day to day existance. Thus leaving users with a system that can do cool stuff but is open to abuse turned out to be a problem in the long run for all of us. Thankfully Microsoft are working to improve this, and from what little I’ve used of Windows XP it is more secure, certainly coming with the home firewall software in there (I’d rather it was on by default, but I’m picking here). Certainly, being on Mac OS X has meant I’ve not had to worry about this, partly because out of the box Mac OS X is more secure, and partly because it’s less tempting a target due to lower market share numbers.

Link: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/