Mr. Athena recently noticed a BIG slowdown when accessing the Internet from his computer. He at first tried to tell me it was because I played too much Everquest and it was eating up our bandwidth, but I managed to get THAT idea out of his head. :rolleyes: I suggested that he run a virus scan and Ad-Aware to see if he could figure out the problem.
The virus scan turned out clean, but Ad-Aware came up with something like 15 items, all of which were cookies. There were no executables, and nothing in the registry. Deleting these cookies and rebooting made a huge difference. His computer is now zippy as ever.
But what’s the deal with the cookies slowing down the system? How the $#@! does THAT work? My understanding is that cookies are simply data files that certain Web sites store on your computer. They don’t contain executable code, and on their own, they’re benign. The evidence, however, points to them somehow, some way, slowing down his machine.
I repeat: there was nothing but cookies that we removed. No executable files, no little .vbs scripts, nothing but cookies. Am I wrong about cookies being (mostly) benign?
I would say the reboot is the most likely thing that improved the performance. Sometimes apps die but don’t go away completely.
If this happens again, bring up a task manager (crtl-alt-del, or right click on the task bar) and go to the processes tab and sort by CPU utilization. If you see a process using any significant amount of the CPU and it isn’t something you are actually using, that is most likely the culprit.
Cookies are just data files. They are not executable in any fashion. I am 99.99% positive that deleting those cookies had nothing to do with the return of performance.
It wasn’t the reboot. We rebooted several times before running ad-aware, and it was still slow. There were no obvious running processes; both Mr. Athena and I are software engineers, and we know what to look for.
That’s the whole point of this thread. That’s what I thought as well. All evidence, however, points to the removal of the cookies as the fix to the problem.
Adaware doesn’t remove cookies as such, it only removes what they call “spyware components”, which I think are a little more complex than simply “cookies”. Besides being the things that tell AdMonitor or ValueClick that you’ve already seen that ad, and to give you the next one, they also gather information about you and pass it along. This isn’t exactly a “program” as such, but this processing does take up memory on your computer, and if you’ve got a lot of components, sending a lot of information to a lot of different websites, then it slows down your computer.
See the table at the bottom? That’s what Adaware does for you, so you don’t have to worry about making sure you get all those components from all those systems off your computer.
I run AdAware religiously, at least every other day.
One way is to look for a particular item to buy, I did this when checking out a graphics card which it tuenr out I can’t afford yet.
I ended up looking at lots of parts retailers, and when I ran Ad-ware it showed up 15 spyware items.
These are only the spyware cookies that Ad-aware has inits referance file, chnaces are that there are many more, so it makes sense to clear every cookie out once in a while, you will have to re-enter all your passwords but my bet is that your system will be all the faster for it.
DDG: Ad-aware does remove some cookies (per its own FAQ) - as far as I can tell it’s those associated with companies such as DoubleClick who have previously built up bad reputations for misusing customer data.
DDG, you are confusing two different things. Ad-aware does remove spyware like those listed in the table in your link. However, those are actual programs that are installed with, or without, your knowledge that contain spyware components. They are programs that run on your system and access the internet in background.
They are not cookies. Cookies are data files that are not executable. Cookies are used to store information on your computer for future reference. The ones that Ad-aware removes are advertising based and are tracking your interests by the sites that you visit.
Since cookies are used for targeting advertisement to the proper audience, the information in a cookie could trigger the advertiser to send you a huge Java applet to explain why a certain aircraft carrier would be a wise purchase when you start your quest for world domination. But, the cookie didn’t do that itself.
Athena, the only thing I can think of to explain why removing cookies would help performance is if some cookies were corrupted and it caused the connection to an ad-server to hang when it tried to process the information in the cookies.
The Better Half spends a great deal of his time of various tech/pocket PC/shopping for computers websites, etc. so we get a fairly nonstop barrage of spyware. I started patrolling for it after we had a serious run-in with CometCursor, which totally screwed up the computer for a while, and with Gator, which was attached to one of his fave websites, so we kept getting these bizarre popups at odd moments.
CometCursor and Gator are nortorious. Here’s what Gator does: “Gator Leaves the Toilet Seat Up”. Ok, here’s a little more serious explanation: Kicking the Gator Software Habit. It’ll install third party software (spyware) on your system and search your system to find out what software you have install, besides popup ads whenever it feels like it.
But, again, these are actual running programs on your system, not cookies.
Someone who knows more than I can correct me if I am wrong, but DDG, I think your problems are being caused by your permissive installation of software, not innocent browsing. If you permit a program to run that installs spyware, you have been infected in the same way as if you permit a worm/virus to install.
Perhaps what you need is more of a firewall? Or discrimination between software sources?
I had a run-in with a piece of spyware over a year ago (the name included the numbers “3000”) when I installed a prg that looked like a handy-dandy all-'round utility. (Either this was before I knew about adaware, or it didn’t exist then, and I spent a lot of angry agony removing it.) Ever since, I have been super-sensitive about where I get utilities. Some sources of freeware are more likely to have this kind of software than others, and I’ll admit it’s hard to exactly define what they look like, but in the last year, I have not had any spyware corrupting my system (and I just ran adaware again, to be sure).
Don’t Cometcursor and Gator require you to permit them to install? But tons of browsing, by itself, cannot get you infected. What Lord Jim said.
Nope, they don’t. At least, not all the time. I’ve had unfortunate runins with Gator before, and am very much on the lookout for it. I will NEVER willingly allow Gator to put stuff on my computer, and nodody uses my computer except me. Nevertheless, when I ran ad-aware last week, it found Gatorware crap on my machine.
Well, what CometCursor and Gator both do is, when you click on a website that has them, you get a Microsoft Internet Explorer official-looking gray box in the middle of the screen that asks, “Do you want to install Gator [or CometCursor] on your computer?” and it has a lot of official-looking stuff on it, and then it has “Yes” and “Cancel”. So if your computer users include three children, as ours does (did), who don’t know yet NEVER to click on “Yes” without consulting Mommy, you can get a lot of weird and obnoxious sh*t installed on your computer without knowing where it came from.
Sit down to computer, put music CD in CD drive, instead of Windows Media Player starting to play it, suddenly RealPlayer appears out of thin air and starts trying to connect to the Internet. “Where did THAT come from…?”
