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Ad-Aware The preceding three utilities were things that are part of your Windows Operating System. Now, we will discuss three "Third Party" freeware applications that are vital in order to help the vulnerable Windows OS maintain some security and protection against Spyware I would suggest that you do a scan with Ad-Aware at least once a week. Ad-Aware is
already installed on your machine (if you don't have a shortcut, go
to start\allprograms\lavasoft\ad-aware and you will see it.) But if
you're reading this at home and would like to download it for home use,
please go to
Launch Ad-Aware, and before doing anything else, go to the globe, second icon from the right at the top, in order to update it. If you haven't updated for a while, you will probably get a warning message right as you launch Ad-Aware, advising you to update. Please do! This is an update process just like the ones that virus protection software have to go through, in order to protect you from the latest threats that are out there.
Go ahead and click "connect" in order to contact the Ad-Aware server:
Once your update is complete, or if you get a message that an update is not necessary or available, you will end up at the main Ad-Aware screen. The "Smart system scan" option is the default, and in most cases sufficient. Click "Next" and the scan process will begin. This can take anywhere between 2 minutes to 15 minutes, and you can continue working on your computer while this is going on.
Note that the middle of the display tells you which part of the computer is being scanned.
Once the scan is finished, you'll see the "Scan Complete" message on the display, and if there have been infections, you will hear a distinct sound. The "Critical Objects" is the one to watch for. In the example below, there are none, and this is what you hopefully want to see, regularly! Go ahead and click "Next."
The infections, or -as in the example below- the vulnerabilities will display on the next window. You may want to maximize the Ad-Aware display and take a closer look, for your information and future reference.
Now what you need to do is select all of these things, and click "Next." Instead of clicking each one individually, you can select all of them by right-clicking anywhere on one of the boxes, and click on the "Select All" option, toward the middle of the dialog box:
So now that the "nasties" are selected, click "Next". You will get a warning message (I guess maybe some people LIKE to get spam or have 3d parties track their browsing habits ;-) Select the "OK" option, Ad-Aware will go through a Quarantine routine, and zap the bad guys!
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