If you have, or think you have spyware/adware you may find this useful.

From my time in a computer repair shop I can tell you that the number one problem we encounter is adware/spyware. From the problems we divided customers into two groups.
the ones with children, and the ones without.

People who did have spyware had children who used filesharing programs such as emule, kazaa, limewire etc.. This was a general rule, though sometimes it wasn’t right.

Now every file you download isn’t going to contain a virus, but be sensible, scan each file before opening it, and if you dont know what the file does, for heavens sake, dont open it! Leave it and try to find out.

Make a point of scanning .zip files. Only download file types you know.

Another common place to get spyware/adware is websites, when you visit a site your computer downloads all the images into your tempoary internet files, this is great if you visit the site regularly but bad if this website contains a virus. There is a type of virus thats contained in a 1px by 1px image. For this reason I recommend you disable images in emails. On visiting a site during writing this article I became infected by a downloader program, this downloads spyware to your computer. This only happened when I went to the site in internet explorer and not when I used firefox.

If you do have spyware then its no big deal all you need to do is run the following programs:
Adaware - Free
Microsoft antispyware - Free, and dont worry, its not made by microsoft, they bought it - so it does work.

Something to note: Some programs claim to be antivirus software but they are infacte spyware themselves - research anything thoroughly before downloading it.

these two together will remove pretty much anything, as for virus’s you should already have an antivirus such as Norton or Mcafee, if not AVG is a free antivirus software but its no substitute for the real thing.