Let’s say you are at home working on your laptop and you are opening your internet browser. You find that it is taking forever to load. You try opening your word processing document and that’s going just as slow. You are starting to wonder if your computer is going to freeze altogether. You finally get your web browser open and when you do it’s a nightmare navigating to a different page. So when this happens what is it that could be causing your computer to act like it’s running out of gas? The short and sometimes painful answer is spyware.

If you are not familiar with spyware you should know that it comes in a couple of different ways to your computer. The first way is it comes prepackaged. Computer companies will put a unnecessary advertising and programs from companies on your computer that they are contractually obligated to have. The other way to get spyware is by downloading things from the internet and visiting other websites that may not be of the highest quality.

The first thing you know is that they are generally harmless on their own. It’s what happens when you have loads of spyware on the same computer. Each piece of spyware uses your computers active memory. Your computer has a limited amount of active memory. Each spyware uses a little bit of your active memory and once there is too much it makes it harder for you to open new applications.

So what do you do about the spyware on your computer? Well many virus protection programs have spyware an adware removal portions but it may not come standard on all virus programs. This might be an add on that you have to purchase from their website. If this is the case then it is within your best interest to buy from there as opposed to a third party site. Third party sites may contain spyware that cannot be trusted by most computers. So while spyware can cause your computer a problem there is definitely ways to fix this problem.