or at least my laptop. Spy Sweeper from Webroot has changed my life. And I'm not kidding. And they're not paying me to say so. Though I wish they would. Or at least throw in a free subscription for George's limping-along PC. How did I miss all the spying goin' on round here?
For the last few months, my laptop had been getting sicker and sicker. I had no idea what was causing the fluky problems I was experiencing. They were random and therefore not easy to replicate. Some of the things that were haywire included: 1) After browsing about a half-day's worth of sites for work (and blogging of course), I'd start to get pages appearing with broken image links, broken text links, and things would get worse and worse until I couldn't access a page at all. 2) When the browser got completely hosed -- the only page it would bring up was a search page, or a page from my cache that had nothing even remotely to do with the URL I'd typed in -- I would have to shut down completely. 3) Usually on the way to shutdown, things would short circuit even more and the system would hang, requiring a hard shut-down and reboot. 4) Scan disk would activate on startup, and the whole sequence of events would start all over again.
This continued, until it got SO bad this week, I couldn't view TWO web pages in a row without having to restart.
I was ready to throw this thing into the driveway and celebrate its screaming demise.
I started thinking and reading up on spyware, which I knew was out there, but I didn't really realize that it can be more of an obstacle to hassle-free Internet use than viruses. That's what webroot says, and I believe it. I was near insanity, not being able to blog or google or shop or ANYTHING!
Anyway, I installed the trial version of spy sweeper and it located 145 instances of spyware on the ol' Dell and 440 traces, all of which it quarantined nicely.
And I haven't had a problem since--pages come up, no broken links, no annoying search pages begging me to reach inside and strangle them.
If you've been having problems like this, check it out. They seem reputable--if anyone knows any different, please let me know because I think I'm gonna buy the $23 subscription.
Back in b'ness....
-jeneane
