Recommendations to kill adware, spyware, on an XP computer?

[Bob Noel]

Hi:

I would appreciate recommendations for cleaning up an XP machine that appears to have been infected with adware. I don't have a problem
with buying a product for this.

Thanks
Bob

 

[SCCutler]

I use Spybot Search & Destroy, which seems to work very well. You can pay a lot of money but, in my experience, Spybot works very well.

http://www.safer-networking.org/index2.html

If it is an option, though, I'd just blow it out and reload the operating system.

 

[Trapper John]

I'm no IT guy, but the combination of Spybot, AVG antivirus and using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer seems to work well for us.

Trapper John

 

[TknoFlyer]

I would appreciate recommendations for cleaning up an XP machine that appears to have been infected with adware. I don't have a problem with buying a product for this.

I recommend two products good for this:
Ad Aware from Lavasoft.com.
Malwarebytes from malwarebytes.org

It's important you get these from the original vendor. For example, do NOT go to adware-2009.com (one of the paid links shown by Google if you search for "ad-aware"). That site's similar to the notorious "AntiVirus2009" site that loads you up with malware.

 

[AdamZ]

I had some problems with spybot years ago but perhaps now they have fixed what ever glitches they had as if Spike says it works thats like money in the bank for me.

personally on my laptop I use AVG antivirus and AdAware anti spyware softwear. Both were free and they work great.

On my home desktop I use McAfee that I paid for and AdAware. I really like the AdAware. The Free version is very good IMHO albeit not a tech savy opinion.

 

[john smith]

The first thing to run are free:
- get all the MicroSoft updates; one of those updates will rootkit revealer
- AVG anti-virus and AVG-root kit detector
- Adaware by lavasoft
- Spybot Search&Destroy... be carefull! there are fake versions which are actually
malware out there on the web; go directly to the developer's website for download
- go to Trendmicro and run their online anti-virus/malware software
- the best anti-malware application I have found and use is BLINK by eEye. The
personal version is available for $24/year. I will warn you that it is not for the novice
computer user. It is highly customizable. In the three years that I have been using it
(from its first availablity) there has only been one buggy release. After notifying
eEye, they were able to duplicate the problem and it was corrected within a couple
of days. During this time, a temporary patch was issued immediately issued and the
development team communicated their progress on an updated release.
through the discussion group, keeping users advised.

 

[RJM62]

All good suggestions. I tend to start a lot of malware removal job by running ComboFix, however. It's frequently updated, has halfway decent rootkit detection (many, many commercial malware apps install rootkits these days), and is free.

It's not perfect nor is it a complete malware-removal tool. But it does tend to help get badly-infected machines cleaned up enough that I can work on them, at least.

-Rich

 

[alaskaflyer]

All really good suggestions. But since no one else has suggested it...

...if it is that bad you should consider a hard-drive format, a reinstallation of the operating system and your other software, and then installation of whichever of those spyware/antivirus packages you choose.

 

[Capt. Geoffrey Thorpe]

I recommend two products good for this:
Ad Aware from Lavasoft.com.
Malwarebytes from malwarebytes.org

It's important you get these from the original vendor. For example, do NOT go to adware-2009.com (one of the paid links shown by Google if you search for "ad-aware"). That site's similar to the notorious "AntiVirus2009" site that loads you up with malware.

Yea! Thanks.

I had tried Ad Aware (and the Norton stuff) without luck, but Malawarebytes found the stuff that my daughter had downloaded - things seem to be working fine now...

 

[RJM62]

Make sure that you have resident protection. The free version of MalwareBytes doesn't provide this. (Also, make sure you don't have more than one resident antivirus running.)

I've been testing the free version of Comodo Internet Security for a few months now, and am very impressed with it. The heuristics may be a bit over-sensitive at the default settings (it detects some of my malware-removal tools as malware, for example, which is actually quite understandable when you consider how the tools work). It does easily allow files that triggered false positives to be ignored or added to a safe list, however.

I'm actually in the process of bombarding a spare machine with known malware to see how well Comodo does at protecting the machine. So far, it's caught everything I've thrown at it. I'm very close to recommending it as my new favorite antivirus.

-Rich