I just got off the phone with tech support at emachines. I basically trust these guys, they’ve been very helpful to a nontechie like me for the past few years. They guy I spoke to tonight said I should buy some anti spyware programs from webroot.com. He said they’re the real thing; adaware and spybot are history. I would have just gone to the website and bought them but he did let me know that I could buy them from emachines right now at a discount, so of course my BS alarm started screaming.
So what’s the story? Should I actually buy this stuff?
Well as you pointed out he suggested that you buy them from his company and that the well-known FREE ones are “history”. Right.
We use Adaware at my company, a large international law firm, if that’s any comfort (in addition to several others, it’s a multi-pronged thing).
Anyhow I would strongly suggest that you download and use the latest copies of both Spybot and Adaware. Microsoft’s “Antispyware Beta” tool also works quite well. All are free and easy to use.
Emachines may offer to sell it to you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a bad product. Webroot Spysweeper was the top-rated program in several magazine reviews I’ve read. Some of the other stuff like Ad-Aware is free, but only for non-commercial use.
In broad terms:
Take one PC with a Microsoft operating system, turn it on and whether by dial-up or broadband, get onto the internet.
Leave it alone for 15 minutes. That should be more than enough time for it to be probed and scanned several times for vulnerabilities.
If you really want to speed up the process, just click on everything that says “You may be a winner”
The internet really has becone actively hazardous. Turning on a computer without a firewall (either Windows’ built-in, or a hardware device) and malware protection is just as risky and stupid as attempting to walk across a freeway at night in dark clothes.
Linux machines and Macs are substantially less at risk. They are not completely immune, though.