Most people will use anti-spyware program such as Spybot and Ad-Aware to run a scan on the computer when they notice their computer acting weird. Why? The reason is anti-spyware program automates cleaning and removing spyware, trojan or adware found on the computer which is much easier compared to manually digging through your auto startup locations which is risky if you removed the wrong file.

Unlike HijackThis, which advance users will agree that it is a very powerful tool but it requires you to have plenty of experience in removing spyware so you can immediately identify the unwanted entries from the log file. If you’re a novice computer user, you might not even understand what is in the HijackThis log file.

If you’d like to try out yourself on manually removing spyware from your system, you can start off by using this free tool called FreeFixer.

FreeFixer is a general purpose removal tool which will help you to delete potentially unwanted software, such as adware, spyware, trojans, viruses and rootkits. FreeFixer works by scanning a large number of locations where unwanted software has a known record of appearing or leaving traces. The scan locations include the programs that run on your computer, the programs that starts when you reboot your computer, your browser’s plug-ins, your home page setting, etc.

In order to reduce the number of items appearing in the scan result FreeFixer will not show known Microsoft files. For example, no one wants to remove the legitimate explorer.exe or svchost.exe files, so they can safely be hidden from the scan result. To achieve this FreeFixer uses file signatures and catalog files located on your system to check if a file is a legitimate Microsoft file.

However, FreeFixer does not know which the bad files and settings are, so the scan result will contain items you want to keep and perhaps some that you want to remove. It’s up to you to decide. Please be careful! If you delete a legitimate file you may have problems in running a particular software in future. To assist you when determining if anything should be removed you can find more information at FreeFixer’s web site for each item in the scan result. You can for example see what other users chose to do in the same situation. You can also save log file of your scan result and consult the volunteers in one of the FreeFixer helper forums.

It’s slightly easier to use. Just download, install, run FreeFixer and click Start scan. Once the scan is finished FreeFixer will display the scan results for each category. If you’re unsure what is the item, just click “more info” and it’ll show you item information. If you fix an item in the scan result FreeFixer will choose the most reasonable action for that item. For example, if you fix your homepage setting FreeFixer will restore it to the homepage set in a clean install of the Windows operating system. If you choose to fix an item from the process list, FreeFixer will first shut down the process and then remove the executable file.

You should check out this article written by the author of FreeFixer, Roger Karlsson, about “a typical case of spyware removal“. It is a very good guide for you to learn how to clean a typical spyware infection with the help of FreeFixer.

Note: I noticed that FreeFixer is updated every month. So please make sure you’re always using the latest version. I’ve checked and FreeFixer is portable. After installing, just copy the FreeFixer folder from Program Files to USB flash drive.

[ Download FreeFixer | Website ]

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