According to a recent survey, 9 out of 10 computers are infected by some type of spyware program. Many of us work on our PCs without even knowing that our system can work much faster and can be much safer.

Some of the sure signs of spyware infections are:

• Too many popup advertisements—especially when you don’t even have your Web browser open. As the name suggests, the main purpose of spyware programs is to collect information from your PC and send it to external sources. Most of the time, the information collected is about your Web browsing and computer activity. This information is traded by spyware programs to trade with the affiliate websites, who then display these popup ads on your PC.
• Slow computer. Spyware programs eat up a lot of system resources that causes your PC to slow down dramatically. The deteriorated PC performance is more evident if you have more than one spyware infection on your PC.
• Problems with Internet Explorer. Spyware can modify your home page settings and bookmarks. You may notice that you are redirected to affiliate web sites without your consent. You may also be taken to Search engines that display results only from affiliate websites. NewDotNet is one such spyware that copies files such as newdotnet7_48.dll,  newdotnet7_14.dll, and newdotnet7_22.dll to your PC. If your computer is infected with this spyware, then every time you enter an incorrect URL in the Web Browser, you are redirected to an affiliate or advertising website.
• Unnecessary toolbars in your Internet Explorer. Many spyware programs, such as Mirar toolbar, stealthily install toolbars that plug-in to your Internet Explorer.  These toolbars also display unwanted advertisements on your PC, redirect your Web pages to affiliate websites, and slow down your PC.

Spyware programs can be used for much more malicious purposes than just displaying ads on your PC. Many of these programs are keyloggers. This means that they track your keystrokes and take screenshots of your PC and gather confidential information related to credit cards, bank accounts, and usernames/passwords. They then send this collected data to external sources, usually hackers, for malicious use.

Due to these problems, it is very important to ensure that your PC is free from spyware and you must take proper measures to ensure that no spyware gets on to and installs on your computer.

To do this, you need to download and install an anti-spyware tool on your computer. These tools are different from regular antivirus utilities and are specifically designed to check your computer for spyware infections and remove them. Many advanced anti-spyware tools go a step further and act as a barrier to prevent any spyware from creeping on to your PC in the first place.

In addition to an anti-spyware tool, it is recommended that you also download a Windows registry cleaner tool. Just like any other normal software application, even spyware programs add entries to the registry.

Many spyware entries are added in such a way that it is very difficult to locate them. Therefore, you must use a reliable and advanced registry cleaner tool to perform a deep scan of the registry and remove any malicious entries added to it by spyware programs.