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Unless you use the Internet in a very limited fashion, you are going to get spyware sneaking onto the hard-drive of your computer. Accepting this inevitability, why pay for removal tools when there are excellent quality free products to use?

The teenage son of a friend of mine got a new computer a couple of years back and used it on the Internet with just Windows XP Firewall for security for 3 weeks. In that relatively short time, it was infected with 6 viruses, 3 trojans and nearly a thousand spyware programs, including Cool Web Search which is a nasty piece of work despite its name.

Any computer that connects to the Internet should have a good quality suite of security applications. At a minimum this should include a bi-directional (monitors both inbound and outbound communications) firewall, such as Sunbelt Personal Firewall or for the more technically minded Sygate Personal Firewall, an anti-virus application such as Grisoft's AVG Free Edition and an anti-spyware application, all of which should be kept up-to-date. The sheer number of spyware programs polluting the Internet makes it preferable to use two anti-spyware applications to provide backup and redundancy to each other.

The best two to use in combination are the highly popular Spybot S&D (Search & Destroy) and Lavasoft's AdAware SE Personal, both of which are available in free versions for personal use. Spybot should be downloaded and installed first as it may have problems installing if AdAware is already installed on the computer.

Spybot will cleanse the nastier spyware from you computer, but generally ignores that which poses no threat to the integrity of your system, such as tracking cookies. It has an "immunize" feature that blocks all the bad products it already knows about from installing themselves on your computer, remember to do this after each new update. It also has a resident monitoring program called Teatimer that watches for attempts to change critical system registry entries and files. When such is attempted Teatimer asks you if you want the change to go ahead; such changes should only occur when you are installing new software or modifying the settings or options of already installed applications.

AdAware does a more inclusive scan of your computer for you, recording not only the dangerous and malicious, but all the milder spyware like tracking cookies as well. It gives you a threat analysis rating (TAC score) for each spyware item found, but I am yet to find a reason to retain any such

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