Links to free spyware programmes

Spybot Search and Destroy

Spybot Search and Destroy is a good all-round anti-spyware product. It protects your PC from some spyware sites using the Immunize tool and scans, quarantines and removes using the Search and Destroy tool. Although free to use, the developer suggests that you may like to donate. You don't have to, but it would be polite.

The only downside of this product is that it requires manual intervention to receive updates and to run scans.

Spywareblaster

Spywareblaster is purely a protective product. It prevents a list of known bad sites from downloading cookies to your system and also adds a list of known bad sites to the restricted sites section of you browser, thus preventing them damaging your system. Once again the developer suggests that you may like to donate, in return for a donation you get a licence key which enables automatic updates.

Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal

A very popular and very good scanning and removing tool. Once again the free version needs manual intervention to update and run scans, but at £0.00 it fits the tight-wad budget.

A combination of these three packages will find and remove just about any spyware or adware on the net. Just don't forget to run them or you aren't protected.