Happiness is a PC free of Spyware

[johnstonmr]

I just spent over an hour debugging and rooting for spyware on my aunt's PC (ok, some of that was just waiting for Ad-Aware to find stuff). I found 126 different bits of spyware and dataminers. I also discovered that her anti-virus software is useless with WinXP (it's old, from when she ran Win98), which I bet she didn't know even though WinXP tells you so when it does the diagnostics before updating.

Oops.

But it's now free of stupid popup ads and the like. And it's running far better, except for a strange habit of closing LJ whenever I hit "submit".