The importance of scanning for malware more often.

[Demon Cleaner]

My father did no scans and got the malware Zapchast on his PC. I managed to lock it, but it's still lurking on his PC until I find a method to remove it completely.

[Harrison]

Spammer trojans seems to be the biggest thing going around at the moment. It's what the hacker kept putting on the classicamiga server when it was being hacked! The server stats showed over 50,000 emails managed to be sent via the server before we managed to catch it had been hacked and block it!

Virus, trojan, spyware, malware... call it what you will, but it is all coming from the same scum bent on making our lives a misery. I learnt the hard way years ago that you need to keep your virus scanner up to date and working as I contracted a very nasty virus that infected every exe file on my system and a complete system format was the only way to remove it. Since then I've been very good at maintaining my virus checker, firewall, spyware definitions etc...

And although I have a spyware scanner running all the time as part of Outpost and it automatically updates its definitions I don't fully trust it to catch everything. Once a month I like to run a full system scan using Spyware Doctor. I used to use Adaware but it doesn't seem to catch them all compared to Spyware Doctor. I am paranoid though so actually scan the whole system with both!

[LowercaseE]

I try to run my spy-ware scanners regularly but often time I just get lazy and forget. I do keep fairly recent backups of my installed software but all my mp3's and games are just too much to backup and I'd be pxssed if I lost those.

[Demon Cleaner]

I also run Spybot from time to time, once a month or so, but it doesn't find anything special, well, until now, I hope this will stay like this.

[J T]

I've been pretty slack with this too recently (a mixture of laziness and complacency I guess).

Probably I should be more careful as I've downloaded a lot of, uh, stuff recently

[Submeg]

Hmm, I should really invest in a proper version of Ad-Aware or Spybot. Which is better? I am actually going to have to buy the sucker

[Harrison]

Neither are the best any longer. I currently recommend Spyware Doctor. It's a commercial scanner but it is the best one around at the moment.

But do you think I actually purchased it? Just download the trial version and crack it!