Spybot Search & Destroy

Spybot Search & Destroy is a FREE and powerful program designed to target and eliminate all malicious software that has been installed, normally inknowingly, on your computer.  There is spyware, adware and malware.

SPYWARE - computer software that obtains information from a user's computer without the user's knowledge or consent


ADWARE - A form of spyware that collects information about the user in order to display advertisements in the Web browse

MALWARE - is short for malicious software, and is designed to secretly access a computer system without the owner's informed consent.

Below describes how to use the program.

You can download it HERE.

After install, the wizard will appear showing on step 3 of 7.

Select to create a backup of your registry. This will back up your computer should Spybot delete anything that was needed, you can reverse the deletion by backing up from this point right now. It may take a few minutes.

Mine then skipped to step 5 which is to search for updates, Go ahead and select to do this to make sure it is completely up-to-date.

  

A window will appear telling you to select a mirror site for downloading these updates. You can select any one of them you want but I normally select one that is closest to my area (country).

The next window shows available updates to download (check all of them). There will be a progress bar at the bottom of the screen showing you the time left on each download and as they are downloaded each one gets unchecked off the list.

  

It may then tell you to re-apply immunization and to run a full scan. Click OK and then exit the updating window. You may also get another message talking about if you erase the advertising robots you may not be able to continue using their host programs. Just select Don't show this message again and select OK.

  

Now you are going to select to Check For Problems. It will do a full scan of your computer. A window may appear telling you you have X number of temporary file and that if you select YES for them to delete/scan them, it will go faster - select YES.

This WILL take quite some time depending on the size of your computer it has to scan. Be prepared to have something else to do or walk away for a little bit while it does it's thing.

When the scan is done tell the program to delete ALL selected items.

You DO want to delete all of them because they are spyware and can cause problems if you leave any of them on your computer.

Select the Fix selected problems at the top.

It will ask you if you are sure you want to remove the selected items, select YES.

After the removal of the items is completed, it will tell you the number of problems that were fixed.

And all of the fixed problems will be check marked as shown below.

If a problem could NOT be fixed, it will have an X next to it.

After the scan you will Immunize (third choice down on the left side). You may be prompted to close all open browser windows. Click OK. Immunize does not have to be done every time you run this program but it is a good habit to check at the same time to make sure everything is all up-to-date. If anything needs to be done, after you select Immunize, there will be a number of items underneath the unprotected column in red, This is when you need to actually Immunize.

After the progress bar is all the way across, select Immunize with the grenn plus sign next to it at the top (not the one on the left again). If you watch, all the unprotected in red will go to protected in green. ALL DONE.

The RECOVERY page lists all the backups that Spybot created when you fixed problems.

There you can undo any changes in case a removal proved to be problematic. Remove the backups once you are sure you no longer need them. Hint: right-click the list to see more selection choices.

 

• Recover selected items undoes the last changes you made.
• Purge selected ite,s removes the backups that have been created.

The UPDATE page

This what you will see if you are all up-to-date and there are no updates to install:

If there are updates to install, they will be listed in the updater window. Select them all and choose update.

It is recommended to run Spybot Search & Destroy at LEAST once a week or more often if you do a lot of downloading and installing.uninstalling, uploading - things like that.

Spybot gives you a neat little program to help completely erase files from your computer.

Just because you delete a file into your Recycle Bin then empty the Recycle Bin, does NOT mean that all traces of the file is completely gone from existance on your computer,

File Shredder - to ensure that a file is completely erased from the area it is being deleted from, leaveing behind no corruption or fragmants.

There are other Spyware Protection programs out there, but this is the one I use and love because it does it's job great!!!

 ENJOY!