If you have been using computers for any length of time you have become accustomed to a phenomenon that I like to call “Connection Sludge” – that is not a tech term but it accurately describes what happens. You know the feeling, at first your PC is lightening fast and you are happy as can be with the purchase. Then as you go on it slows down a little at a time until one day you realize that your mega super computer on a cable modem is running slower than the 286 model on dial up you had many years ago. That is the Connection Sludge I mentioned.
What happened is that as you surf the Internet you hit websites that drop little cookies on your PC and install little bots and other fun things on your computer to enhance your browsing experience by tracking what you do so your computer can their website know your habits and potentially speed up what you are doing.
In effect what they have done is put Spyware on your computer, which just slows you down. The more places you visit the more things that are placed there to help your computer speed up and before you know it, Connection Sludge and you are cussing at the PC, calling the computer tech support, calling your providers help line, purchasing tons of virus programs which may help marginally, if there is a virus in there.
What you really should be doing is looking into and sifting through the plethora of programs out there that are designed to search and remove Spyware from your computer and restore its performance and speed.
You can help prevent some of this buildup by setting your firewall settings on your computer to the most effective settings and this alone will stop the majority of the annoying intrusions. At some point things will get too tough on you and you will need to break down and get a good method to combat the intrusions. There are free to fairly pricey programs out there and they work from mildly ok to phenomenal. I have tried a lot of them and one of the best, by far that I have come across is a program called Spyware Cease.
What these programs do, in an over simplified description, is look over the various areas on your computer where these programs can and do drop the little things onto the drive. Depending on the program and how you have it set, it will automatically remove the file, disable it and put it in a subfolder where it can’t work or ask you what to do with the file.
Personally, I have found that the latter option is usually the best. The reason is that there are a lot of programs that actually put files that it needs to reference here and there on your PC and when a Spyware program finds it, it may think it is a problem. If you have it set to remove it, then you might accidentally screw up the program to where it won’t work and some programs won’t allow you to just move the file back to the original location and still work. It may stop it from working even if you put it where it was and acts like you have an illegal program which means uninstalling that program and reinstalling it from scratch.