Unclogging the crap from a cranky computer

So last night Lisa and I had dinner at the home of a family from church (this guy makes a pretty mean ravioli) and his wife asked if I could take a look at their computer: seems it was going torturously slow. So after the blackberry cobber dessert I followed 'em upstairs and went to work. It was indeed slow as molasses. Slower even. I spent the next hour and a half working on the thing. And ya know what the real problem was?

I downloaded Ad-Aware, in my experience one of the best anti-adware programs around, and installed to their system. For the next hour or so (figuring the restart after storms knocked power out momentarily) it went through the computer and located 553 bits of adware and spyware! No wonder it was crawling! Anyway after Ad-Aware scanned the system and quarantined the offending matter, the computer started performing much faster.

If your system seems to be slowing down, who knows but it might have some "barnacles" attached to the hull. Scrape 'em off with Ad-Aware, by Swedish developer Lavasoft. The basic program is free, with a paid version that comes with a lot more options and whistles. It's by far one of the more useful bits of software I have on my own systems.