Long past are the days people did not use antivirus programs and did not worry about their online activities.  Today viruses and spyware are everywhere and are growing in number and complexity daily.  It is a near certainty at some point you will get infected.  Nine out of ten internet connected computers have an infection.  If you feel your computer is one of them at this is point the simplest thing to do is call Better By Design to remove them.  The worst thing to do is install more programs because the computer tells you to, or a scan directs you to xyz spyware removal program.  These also are usually filled with more spyware and the cycle only gets worse.  Time will not heal the problem and will often make things much much worse.  

Often times these programs can be fairly benign simply popping up extra pages online or other nagging things, but not all stop there.  A more infected computer may grind to a halt making programs excruciatingly slow, or crash repeatedly.  Still worse is the computer that once infected allows a 3rd party to have access to your computer.  Others simply monitor all of your keystrokes and send back passwords, banking info, and info necessary to steal a person's identity.   Some do all of this unnoticed and once infected these programs usually start disabling security programs, to weaken your computers defenses.  This way more and more bad programs can infect your computer.  Infected computers rarely have one infection and generally have many. 

Most of these programs are installed under the premise that they are helpful utilities.  The program may act fine but it can also carry unwanted additional software that runs without a users knowledge.  Many times peer to peer programs are also carriers for these types of programs.  We discourage the use of P2P programs as most uses for these programs, such as to attain music, are illegal.  They are also one of the major avenues people use to spread these bad programs. 

Many people often wonder why these programs exist and the clear answer is money.  These programs often redirect your internet browsers to ads and pop up links to advertising.  In this way the owner of the sites makes money by your infected computer seeing these sites.  Many times popups will give you an option of installing software or not, but both yes and no mean yes.  It is very easy to manipulate pop up windows to look like something they are not and further infect people. 

At Better By Design we are trained to remove these infections and not just minimize their appearance.  Keep in mind the faster you call, the cheaper your bill will be.