[Thinkerbell]

I can recommend Wincleaner Oneclick--I run this every day. It's pretty fast, and gets rid of lots of junk other programs miss. I can also recommend Ad-Aware. It takes a little while to run, but it finds all kinds of crap and has gotten rid of some really pesky stuff for me.

And now a word of WARNING!!!! Do not under any circumstances get Stopzilla!!! After I got fiber-optic broadband, I had all sorts of pop unders and garbage assaulting both of my computers. I got Stopzilla and loaded it on my Dell desktop computer. Then I put it on my laptop. Within days, my laptop was trashed. It turns out that lots of people have had severe problems with Stopzilla on laptops--to the point that the laptop was unusable. It took me days on the phone with Dell to get it all straightened out. Since they uninstalled the Stopzilla, the laptop is working like normal. I still have the Stopzilla on the desktop, but I got the blue screen of death the other day. So I will probably uninstall it from that one, too. so I paid a total of $29.95 and $14.95 (to be able to put it on the laptop) for nothing but heartache and trouble.

[Lytspeed]

I'm a computer geek too, and I agree with the good advice people have posted here. I can also recommend Webroot Spysweeper, Spybot Search and Destroy , and Windows Defender (formerly Windows Anti-Spyware Beta, which was formerly GIANT software.)

The latter two are free, and the former is only $29.95. My personal favorite is Spysweeper, but I actually run all three plus virus protection on the computers at my house. Some anti-spyware programs will catch bugs that other's can't, so it's a good idea to run more than one program.

However, even though this will help protect your computer, it will also slow down the load time and take a lot of overhead on your RAM. Iceberg's advice is good; add as much RAM to your computer as you can afford to keep the performance/protection balance in place.

Also, keep in mind that you need to have 1.5x the amount of RAM available on your hard drive in order for the Windows swap files to work correctly. In other words, if you have 1 Gb of RAM on your computer, make sure you have at least 1.5 Gb free on your hard drive, or else your system will run out of virtual memory.

[pethiest]

I can't give you a specific recomendation but I suggest you do a web search on it and see which one would suit your needs and price range. If you want to save money you could always move the important things on the C: to the D: and then format the C: and then transfer the stuff back to the C: from the D: if your D: has enough space on it that is

[iceberg]

ATT Yahoo comes with Anti-Virus included ($15 / mo) and every two weeks an " ! " shows up on the bottom right signalling that it is time to run the scanner. It found an Adware, Trojan and Hijacker program plus 50 cookies, that are now history. VOILA, my laptop works pretty good now.