One of my customers today had a problem with general computer slowness, pop-ups and couldn't hook up to their cable connection. This particular client is well known to me because I help clean up the computer on a fairly regular basis. My advice is always the same: don't use free download services (Bear Share was loaded), online poker sites are known spyware beds (two different online poker programs were loaded), please use the proven anti-virus and anti-spyware software that I install and configure (my software was deleted in favor of the super secure AOL Security Suite).
After removing the AOL security suite and re-enabling the high speed connection, I installed AVG Anti-virus and Anti-spyware. Just doing a quick scan with the Anti-spyware program yielded more than 80 spyware problems which AVG then dispatched of quickly. Is this a slam of AOL? No, just a factual account of yet another example of what I find on computers that use sup-par security systems. To be fair to the AOL system, the computer user engaged in practices that would tax any computer system, but the problems would not have been nearly magnified with the security setup that we recommend.
Bottom line is that no matter how secure you make a computer, using it for activities known to cause problems like free music or video download services, online gaming, visiting seedy sites, etc will tax the system and eventually break it.
