Microsoft and the big hardware manufacturers are more and more confronted with helpdesks being flooded with problems related to spyware. It's the next Internet Plague. A few years ago it was spam, and now it's spyware. Since over 50% of households are connected via broadband, getting infected with spyware has taken on epidemic proportions. Spyware now has reached critical mass, and is actually worse than viruses. Why? There is money in it. Big money as a matter of fact.

Spyware is a generic term for many different kinds of malware. They are programs working in the background, doing something to your PC behind your back and in the shadows. Some products are benign in the sense that they don't do any specific damage to your PC, but direct info about you to a third party. Other products might be feeding the sites you visit with specific ads. If you have one or two of these floating around, you might not even know they're there unless you run an antispyware program such as Lavasoft's ADAWARE.

There is malicious code out there that really has no other motive than to steal. That might be your identity, or the use of your computer, and/or your social security and credit card info. Dial up connections that incur long distance charges on your phone bill are common. In many cases, it is now organized cybercrime that does their work via internet sites in Russia or Asia.

If you see popups you did not ask for, or your browser gets hijacked, or your PC is slowing down and your CPU is busy inexplicably, you have a good chance your PC is "owned" by someone other than you. Computers that are "always on" are now often used to send spam, send viruses, or are part of a network of "zombies" that are controlled by the bad guys and used to attack another site.

The problem is that you may have a dozen or more of these parasites on your PC. These pests congest a PC by adding files and folders, cookies, DLLs, and Registry entries. This combination gobbles up online bandwidth and computer resources, and they all ultimately put a strain on your CPU. And the more spyware you have loaded and running, the more complicated and difficult it becomes to remove them.