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What is Spyware? While the actual definition of what constitutes Spyware is somewhat vague, here is the most common definition: “a program that sends information from your computer to another destination on the Internet without your knowledge and without your explicit consent.”

How did I get them? Spyware is installed “piggy backed” along with popular programs downloaded from the internet. The reason they do this is because the Spyware companies pay these software companies for every install of the Spyware onto a user’s computer.

Why is spyware annoying?

- Violates your privacy
- SLOWs down your computer
- SLOWs down your network connection
- Redirects home page and Popups (not always)

Ad-Aware is one of the most well known Spyware removal tools. Here are a few of its advantages:

Extremely easy to use
Ad-aware employs the familiar one-button scan mechanism seen in most popular anti-virus packages, and as such will feel familiar to most users.

Auto update
An auto-update feature included with the latest version

Much faster then other Spyware removal utilities
In combination with the new scanning engine, Ad-Aware will scan your computer noticeably faster and more thoroughly than ever before!

And, it’s... free
Ad-Aware Personal edition is free for non-commercial use.

Where do I download it? You can check this out at http://www.lavasoftusa.com.

Backing up your computer:

Your computer is starting to fail in small ways. Some applications don’t run, others just crash for no apparent reason. You try to save your email folder, including email addresses, and that important email you just received from a friend traveling overseas. But it’s too late, now the computer won’t even boot up properly. There’s no way to access most of the documents that you’ve been working on for the last year. And if that’s not bad enough, your children are unhappy because their saved games are gone as well.

This may sound overly dramatic, but it can easily happen on almost any computer. It can be caused by a software failure in the operating system, or by a hardware failure. Hard drive manufacturers used to have a 4 year warranty on their parts, but within the last couple years, most of them have gone to a one year only warranty. That doesn’t give you much time to notice a problem. And even if your hard drive does fail, it could be too late now to copy your important files off the computer.

Backing up your home computer is very easy to do, and should be done once a month or more depending on the importance of the files you work on. You can even back up your email folder so that you don’t lose important email addresses.

The easiest way to back up data is to use a ZIP drive, a CD writer drive, or a USB pen drive. All of these devices hold a lot of data (from 100MB to over 700MB) and can be rewritten over unlimited times. The advantage of this method is that it is easy and cheap. Most of us already have a CD writer and CD-Rs (or CD-RWs). The disadvantage of this method is that it relies on the computer user to do the manual backups on a regular basis.

A very effective way to back up computers is by a network method. The advantages are that the backups are off site, which increases security, and that the process is usually automated so that nobody has to change the backup media or start the process. The disadvantage is that it can be complicated to set up, and is usually not feasible for the home user.

However, there are some easy solutions. Microsoft has built in a backup utility into Windows XP. If you use this Operating System at home, you can make use of this utility to back up the critical folders and files. The details of how to use this tool can be found online at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308422.

While a computer backup will take several minutes, it’s a much more convenient option than losing months - or years - of work and personal files when your computer fails.

Thunderbird Email lients:

Email programs come in different varieties and with different features. Some are better looking than others, some have a more intuitive way of doing things. But they fundamentally do the same thing...receive and send out emails.

Right now, we’ll take a quick look at one of the free stand-alone email programs called Thunderbird written by the fine folks at www.mozilla.org.

Some of the features include:

Junk mail controls - It has its own built-in filtering system. You can override what Thunderbird thinks as junk mail by clicking on the “Not Junk” button.

Message filters - Pretty much a standard in all email clients. You can create your own filter rules based on the “Subject:”, “From:” etc.

Built-in spell checker - Because not all of us have a dictionary at hand.

More secure - It doesn’t allow scripts to run by default. If vulnerabilities have been discovered, patches are released at a much faster time.

Customize - Add features and the way it looks by using Extensions and Themes. You can add them by going to the “Tools” option.