cleaning off your HD
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- shellie
i just got rid of 5 gigs worth of complete crap.. seriously... pure trash off my HD. *phew* i havent done that in a long time.
can anyone suggest any good programs to DL that will de virus or de-spyware your computer? i wanna run some of those programs to clean house.. just in case.
- flatulence0
to clean off spyware, i'd go with adaware...
- enobrev0
I'd probably reccommend spybot, search and destroy over adaware, but in the end they're both very good.
- chall50
Backup everything you need and rebuild
- sparker0
beyond removing spyware and viri, a good thorough freespace wipe will be good for the hd too.
i suggest getting 'mutilate' file wiper (free from download.com) or buying the PGP Encryption suite and using it's freespace wiper.
all of that crap you deleted is actually still on the hd. it could easily be recovered by the right tools. a freespace wiper removes all that residue by overwriting the 'empty' space with binary. this will actually free up more space on the drive too. not too mention get rid of the things you think you've deleted.
i would also look into finding a good "shred" utility for windows. instead of just deleting files, shred them.
i believe mutiliate comes with such a util.
- unknown0
I use spybot search & destroy - it seems to find adware quite well but it doesn't protect against it very well.
Zone Alarm is a good firewall program for blocking this kinda thing but as well as blocking adware, it can quite annoyingly block flash / embedded objects / etc - I have yet to find a middle-ground security setting that blocks all the bullshit but allows flash / java etc.