Have you ever been surfing online or reading your email and notice your computer’s Internet connection is running a bit slow. You look over at the modem and see the lights blinking like mad and you aren’t even doing anything. There is a good chance you may have some spyware on your system and you are watching it as it transmits data back to its home servers. That data tells whoever is receiving it all about what you are doing every time you are on your computer.

The first thing to do, if you haven’t already, is download a program like AdAware or Spybot: Search and Destroy and immediately update the program online. Once you have done that, reboot your computer and disconnect the modem so nothing can be transmitted in or out of the computer, which can render any spyware dormant.

After you’ve rebooted, run the program and let it do a full scan on your system for spyware of all types. The program will alert you when the scan is finished and will let you know how much spyware it found. You will be prompted on how to proceed. The big decision is do you delete or not? If the program lists it as spyware, get rid of it.

Once the program has finished, run it again or if you have two, run the other program to see if it catches anything the first one missed. The next step is to look through the Start Menu to see if there are any new programs installed that you don’t recognize. If you find one, uninstall it completely.

Once that is all done, your system should be clean. To keep it that way, make sure that you have one of the programs set so it always loads at boot up so it can detect any new spyware as it tries to infest your system and stop it in its tracks.