Boring but helpful?

I don't know about you, but sometimes my computer just gets bogged down in unidentified junk, and our supposed anti-virus software just isn't doing its job.
I was listening to Clark Howard yesterday as I drove from one music therapy client to another.

HE IS MY HERO.

If you don't know of him, go to his website and find out which station carries his talk show. I learn something useful from him every time I listen. He is, possibly, MORE FRUGAL THAN I.
I know, hard to believe, right?
Anyway, yesterday he was talking about scareware. Go look on his website if you want the whole story, but the short version is this. Pop-up boxes are coming up on people's computers, telling them that they have gotten a virus and to click on the box to get rid of it. It looks like an official anti-virus notification.

But DO NOT CLICK ON THE BOX.

It will download a virus and shut down your computer.
He also recommended Spybot, which I have used in the past but forgotten about. It is a free download that will Search and Destroy all those nasty little buggers that slow down your computer. I ran it last night and it completely fixed all the little freezing and slowing problems that I was having. One word of warning: it takes a long time to run the programme, like at least an hour. This page will lead you to several other "clean-up" programmes recommended by Clark.

Another handy hint from Clark was that you should have more than one search engine on your computer, so that if a virus shuts down one of them, you can still get on the net to fix it. No problem at our house, as I use Firefox and everybody else hates it!

There.
I posted.
Maybe it was even useful.