The computer that I typically use at my house is almost always expressly used by myself for business purposes. My children have their own computer that they use in another room in the home, but this one evening they did not want to go into the other room so I decided to allow them to use my computer for a change. After all, how much harm could they possibly do in a single hour that they would be working on my computer?

Actually, it took less than an hour for the problems to really begin and it wasn’t long before I begin hearing them complaining about all the pop-up windows that were showing up on my computer. I walked over to the computer, not really understanding exactly what they were talking about and I was shocked at what I saw. There were so many pop-up windows that I could not even see the actual windows that were underneath them. This was very frustrating because I am always so careful with the things that I download to this computer.

Apparently what had happened was that one of my children had downloaded something off of the computer and transferred it over to their laptop through the network. This typically would not have been a problem but in the process, a small program was opened that allowed a spyware program to be installed on my computer. It would not have been so bad if there was only one spyware program that was there, but that is only the beginning of what happened.

Once the spyware have a hold on my computer, it started to open doors through the network to allow other pieces of spyware to come on board. Not only was spyware coming on to my computer, that were actually several viruses that also came on which made some of my programs inoperable. It was one of the most frustrating things that I had ever gone through with my computer, and I started to look for a way to correct it.

The first thing that I did was to go to an anti-spyware site and download the free scanner that was available. It took a little while for this to happen, simply because my computer was so inundated with spyware that it was taking up most of the system resources. After the initial scan, I found out that in that short period of time I had downloaded over 300 different pieces of spyware and they were all wreaking havoc all my computer at the same time.

When the scan was completed, it gave me a list of all of the different problems that had occurred and I simply allowed the anti-spyware program to begin cleaning the computer, one spyware program at a time. It did take a little bit of time, only because there were some of the most notorious spyware programs that were all my computer and they do take a bit to clean. The program required that I restarted the computer and after I did, all of the pop-ups were gone.

I no longer have a difficult time with spyware, because the anti-spyware program that downloaded is always running in the background and protecting me from any malicious downloads. Although I never do anything on my computer myself that would typically cause spyware problems, it’s nice to know that I’m protected just in case.