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As an early Christmas gift, I treated my aging computer to a memory upgrade. The improvement is remarkable: she now performs like a machine half her age (or twice her speed) . If only modern medicine could do the same for me! I even noticed some improvement when browsing the internet, though the real bottleneck there is my telephone line. Even if I had the fastest computer with acres of memory, it couldn't display information faster than the phone line can receive it.
Still, I found myself watching the little "resource meter" that shows how much memory is available, and soon noticed that it gradually dropped as the day went on. I checked the "task manager" but didn't find any extra programs running. What was chewing up my RAM?
Then one morning I tried to look up something on the internet and I realized that, although the screen was loading unbearably slowly, my modem was working overtime ... sending data at a furious rate. The mystery was solved. A spyware program had installed itself on my machine, sat (invisibly) in memory, and was happily sending information about all the sites I had visited to some marketing firm.
"Spyware" is the latest marketing tool. It works by loading onto your computer a program which collects information, such as the web sites you have visited, then sends it, over your internet connection, to marketing firms or advertisers. Spyware programs attach themselves to "free" programs you download, and, I suspect, to ads on web sites. They are insidious, odious, and perfectly legal.
Aside from the obvious privacy concerns are the practical issues of "stealing" limited resources. Each of these programs uses a bit of memory, thus slowing down your computer. But the worst impact is on the most limited resource: bandwidth. Surfing over a phone line is slow enough, without having the line clogged sending unwanted transmissions
Spyware is not a virus, and won't be identified or removed by any virus checkers, but you can get rid of it. Two free programs that will remove spyware are Ad-Aware, available at www.lavasoft.de and X-Cleaner, at www.xblock.com. Both will scan your hard drive and registry, and remove any spyware programs. Like mice in an old farmhouse, as fast as you catch one, another will move in, so you'll have to check for them regularly.
If your computer seems unusually slow, it's worth checking to see if someone is stealing your phone line.
For more information on spyware, or any other internet topic, come to the next meeting of the Kawartha Internet Users' Group. We meet on the 2nd Thursday of each month, 7pm, at the Lions' Hall, Main St., Bobcaygeon.