Strictly speaking this review does not fall under Mozilla Firefox reviews category. However since most of the review talks about this browser, I have decided to put it into this category. The review basically talks about spyware removal from your PC.
How to get rid of Spyware on your PC?
What is Spyware?
As per Webster’s New Millennium dictionary it is any software that covertly gathers information about a user while he/she navigates the Internet and transmits the information to an individual or company that uses it for marketing or other purposes.
Spywares are particularly troublesome if you are using a broadband always-on connection to the internet. These users are the main targets of Spywares.
Spywares stay resident on the system and clog your CPU and memory causing an overall performance degradation of your system. Most common symptoms are…
Your computer takes forever to boot.
Your computer takes forever to shutdown.
Your computer goes into a loop every time you click on MS Word or MS Outlook.
The spam mail in your mailbox has increased by 500%
You are greeted with unbelievable popup ads wherever you go on the internet. Surprisingly the same sites behave normally from a friend’s PC.
Your homepage gets reset to some vague and shady search engine every time you boot up your PC.
This list just goes on… Spywares can effectively bring down your efficiency by almost 90%. However instead of banging your head on the keyboard, you can try cleaning up the system and bringing some paradigm changes in the way you access the internet.
First things first, in order to completely erase all spywares on your PC, you need to format your hard disk and start afresh. If this is not an option, please follow the steps outlined below to clean up the system.
- Install anti spyware software such as Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware and SpyBot Search & Destroy. These two programs go hand in hand and a combination of these two identifies most spywares installed on the system.
Ad-Aware available at: https://lavasoft.com
SpyBot available at:
https://pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0, fid, 22262, 00.asp
Make it a point to scan your system using these programs at least once in two weeks.
Most file-sharing programs such as Kazaa, Napster, Audiogalaxy etc come with spywares. So please refrain from using these P2P clients.
Some of your most favorite software programs are not that trustworthy. For instance, Plaxo – the hugely popular contacts manager reportedly comes bundled with spyware. Plaxo users have been complaining of a surge in the number of spam mails they receive per day.
Gator, WeatherBug etc are the main culprits. Please do search your registry for these keywords “Gator” and “Weather”. Delete all the instances mercilessly.
Now, once you are done with this cleanup, throw Internet Explorer off your second floor window and download Mozilla Firefox browser. This is the permanent solution for the spyware problem plaguing your PC. Please note that Internet Explorer is an integral part of “Windows” and so you cannot throw it off your window that easily. In fact you simply can’t uninstall it. However you can stop using it.
Firefox browser is highly customizable. You can add more functionality to the browser by installing “Extensions”.
Some of the most useful extensions to Firefox are…
1. AdBlock: This extension filters all the ads on a web-page. In fact you can block all the images on the web page with this extension. Next time you are opening Times of India page at your work place, you don’t have to worry about the graphic pictures on the site. I have noticed that by blocking all images, the page load speed increases dramatically. This blocks the annoying popups too.
2. IE View: Some Victorians, who haven’t yet heard about this miracle browser, haven’t made their sites compatible with Mozilla Firefox yet. For such sites, this extension proves handy. When you go to a webpage and find that it is not loading properly in Firefox, all you have to do is to right-click and select “Open with IE” option. The page then opens in Internet Explorer. However the situation is improving day by day. Most sites are now Firefox compatible.
It has been my experience that a simple feedback mail to the site owners normally does the trick. (Thanks to Zone5 for suggesting this.) I had sent an email to Deccan Chronicle newspaper that they should enable their site to FF users and within a week the site had been made FF compatible.
3. SwitchProxy: For people who work with multiple proxies (I switch between three proxies everyday.) this is a great extension. Instead of going to Tools menu – options – connections – LAN connections etc to change the proxy, this extension simply provides a dropdown box as a toolbar in the browser. You just select the proxy you want to use and click OK.
Here are some more tips to decrease the page load time in Mozilla Firefox if you are using a broadband connection. Thanks to prope//er. (I took this piece of information from his post in Sulekha Technology forum.)
Open a new window/tab in FF. Type “about:config” in the address bar. (Without the quotes). This will fetch in a number of configuration parameters.
Now, search for the following parameters.
a. network.http.pipelining. Set it to True.
b. network.http.proxy.pipelining. Set it to True.
c. network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. Set it to 30
Create a new integer variable: nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set it to zero.
- Now restart Firefox.