You may have run into some stuff online telling you that - "Oh, spyware reallly isn't all that bad. It won't hurt your computer." But it ain't exactly so. In most cases spyware and adware will not cause damage to your files. It may interfere with the functioning of your computer by downloading junk, altering program and registry settings, sending your browser off to places you don't want to go or adding annoying toolbars and opening you up to multiple popups. AZnnoying but not, I guess really damaging.

However, there are other things spyware can do such as monitor your personal computer online activities. How does the idea of some hacker bozo out there receiving a keystroke by keystroke record of all your entires, logins, passwords - maybe your credit card info? That's a real dangerous invasion of your privacy. And of course it's using up storage, processor time and your internet bandwidth to store your activities and then send them to its mother.

Even less radically intrusive and less potentially dangerous information collection on your surfing habits by less malevolent programs looking to collect data for analyzing surfers' behavior, is still an invasion of your privacy.

Preventing these intrusions into your private life is the main reason for installing a good anti-spyware program. The secondary reason is the effect of accumulating spyware and adware programs on your computer's performance and on your browser. Of course, browser security is getting much better, but it isn't ever going to be perfect so additional supporting programs like firewalls, anti-virus and anti-spyware programs should be an essential part of your personal computer (and identity) security package.

You can pick up the pdf on dealing with spyware by signing up over on the right. And for a comprehensive approach to protecting and speeding up your computer take a look at Fast PC Secrets.

Since my one small problem with Fast PC Secrets had to do with the anti-spyware, I thought that I'd share my own solution. That's where that overlay came from that you saw. It should only appear once a week in case you come back (actually I'll probably up that to once a month or so as soon as I'm satisfied it's working OK) - after all once you see it you can always use the sidebar signup if you decide to pick up PC Health: Beating the Spyware Epidemic.

As I said in the layover, the pdf has some information on Spyware (and you can find more definitions by browsing through the Geektionary definitions) and information about and links to several free anti-Spyware and anti-Adware programs that I use regularly. These programs are not active scanners so they don't use up your PC's resources. They include blocking of bad sites and known dangers as well as system scanning and fixing. So they'll help you clean out any junk that did get onto your machine - if you run them regularly and keep them updated.

The files that these programs use to protect you are updated regularly so you do need to remember to both run them and check for updates. I'd strongly recommend that you run them at least once a week and each time you run, also go ahead and check for updates. It's very easy to fall out of the habit of running and upgrading these programs - until your machine gets trashed or slows to a crawl and you end up moaning and wishing you'd remembered.

I know I have to keep working on remembering to do it so I suspect other people have the same problem. If your machine can support running active scanners for both anti-virus and anti-spyware protection, that's usually the best solution since the programs can be set to automatically check for and download updates. With my machine, it just slows down way too much under the combined load of active scanners and the number of applications I need to run simultaneously.

You've probably heard that one way how to speed up your computer is to clean up your registry. Over time the registry builds up junk. Programs that you remove don't always uninstall cleanly. Spyware and other malware can insert entries into your registry which may not get totally cleaned out even if you do get rid of the bad stuff.

However this is only part of the process of how to speed up your computer and optimize your PC's performance. Yet it gets a great deal of press and a lot of people do buy stand alone registry cleaners. What I've got here is a list of the top three registry "fixer" programs (according to ClickBank statistics). Check them out if you are interested. You'll discover some interesting things. All three of these products offer a free and immediate download. RegCure, Registry Fix and the RegistrySmart registry cleaners are not free programs. What they are offering is a free scan. You would need to buy the product to get the problems revealed by the scan fixed.

As I said, all three of these are top sellers from ClickBank which means that they will not be loading any spyware since they wouldn't stay long on ClickBank after the first complaint or two. It also should mean that they do their job or people would be getting refunds and complaining loudly. Each has similar features. The prices - which are not shown on the pages - are in the $35 to $40 range.

Since you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't want to speed up your computer, you also need to decide how you want to go about it. Since one major factor is the state of your registry, you might want to check these programs as well as Fast PC Secrets.

Do I recommend any of them? Not really and it isn't because they don't work. I'm sure they work fine. But I do think Fast PC Secrets does more for you - it's not just a one-trick pony. These 3 programs basically just clean your registry and leave you with a bunch of other tasks you still need to learn about and do to keep your PC running fast and smoothly. But some people have a strong preference for commercial programs optimized for a single purpose. And these are the three most popular registry cleaners in today's marketplace, if you'd like to check them out.

Top Selling Registry Cleaners from ClickBank - Computers and Internet (01/16/2008):

#2 RegCure

#4 RegistryFix

#6 RegistrySmart

I have a preference for learning something and understanding what I'm doing and why - it helps me to actually carry out things like regular maintenance. If it's something I'm unclear about I also like a step-by-step easy to follow set of procedures. And I'd rather have both video and written procedures rather than either one alone. I also don't see a real good reason to have to purchase a bunch of stuff to handle what I see as a single objective - in this case, how to speed up my computer. I've been successfully using Fast PC Secrets for 8 months or so now. The procedures work and I didn't have to spend any additional money on other programs or guides.

The one area where I have some differences with the method in Fast PC Secrets is with regard to anti-spyware programs. With my particular machine leaving the anti-spyware running all the time slowed my machine down. When that happened I contacted support and got a quick response suggesting just doing anti-spyware scans weekly or as needed. With too many resident programs using up processor time and memory and with my machine's hardware configuration and the way I work (right now I have 6 applications running and a few minutes ago I had 9), it works much better for me to just scan on an as needed basis. As well as doing that I also do a couple other things for spyware and adware which I'll be going into in a later post.

I do a great deal of work online - in fact I nearly live online at times. But I don't have a fast fancy bleeding edge machine. I work on a 5 year old laptop that I bought factory reconditioned. It's got a decent enough CPU at 1.3MHz and I did put 512MB of RAM in, but it only has a 30Gigabyte hard drive.

I do hook it up to a second monitor so I have a really large desktop to work on since I almost always have multiple programs running. As you might guess anything that slows the machine is not good - there isn't a lot of slop in the system so it's important to keep it clean and optimized.

I used to do the regular stuff. Run a fire wall and an anti-virus. Keep my Recycle bin clear. Compress my email. Get rid of old programs I wasn't using. Run a couple anti-spyware programs once in a while. And, fairly rarely do a disk defrag. Then my anti-virus license expired and I decided to upgrade to an all-in-one program, Norton 360, since the Norton anti-virus had been doing a decent job. It turned into an absolute horror show and after removing it and re-installing it, it didn't get any better and my machine was basically unusable. Maybe it was my particular configuration, I didn't care. I got my money back and went looking for alternatives.

I also realized that I really hadn't been maintaining the machine all that well. Some things I just didn't do at all or didn't do often enough. Some of my anti-spyware hadn't been updated in a while and I hadn't spent the time to learn some of the XP tricks for optimizing.

That's when I found Fast PC Secrets by Tiit Raag. The weird thing was that I recognized the name since I'd read some of his posts on forums. Anyway, I decided to go ahead and try out his system - it was a lot less than Norton 360 and it provided more features and laid out a step-by-step process both for the initial full clean up and then for on-going maintenance. It didn't require purchasing any additional software or paying any monthly fees and it cam with full video walkthrus of everything. Since sometimes video tutorials make me crazy I checked and sure enough it also included full pdfs of the material. I usually prefer to read and maybe look at the pictures - I always feel like I ought to be taking notes with videos and with the pdfs I didn't have to worry about that. I did, of course, watch the videos first and they're good - professionally produced and recorded.

So that's how I ended up with Fast PC Secrets which is about enough for this one post. Next time some more about how it worked for me (it did and it still does work great, but I'll provide a little more detail than that).

So then, how to speed up your computer the easy way. Add more RAM. This is probably the single simplest, easiest way to boost your machine's performance. But it only works if you actually need more RAM. If you already have a gigabyte or two, you need a different solution or group of solutions.

And probably you ought to go through a full system tune-up. While some parts of a full scale "tune-up" can require additional software or some detailed guidance, here are a couple of things you can do which will improve your computer's performance.

First, when was the last time you defragmented your hard drive? True, It can be time consuming with today's large hard drives but you can always let it run over night. Assuming you have a PC running Windows look under Accessories and System Tools (or whatever it's called in your version of Windows) and find the Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter. Before you run either of these, it might be a good idea to run ScanDisk to check the disk for errors.

If you right click on the drive you want to work on in Windows Explorer and then chose Properties you should find the disk cleanup function under the General tab and ScanDisk (Error-checking) and Defragmentation on the Tools tab. Again, you should probably run error-checking (ScanDisk) first and then you may want to run the Disk Cleanup program before you use the Disk Defragmenter. The combination should give you more disk space and faster file access - unless the drive remains highly fragmented. This can happen when the drive is nearly full and there are files which can not be moved. The less free space there is on your drive, the more fragments will probably still be there and the longer the defragmentation process will take.

If you have unused programs or old unneeded files, uninstalling the programs you don't use and deleting the files you no longer need frees up disk space. So this might be something you'd want to do before any other step.

I used to be pretty hesitant about doing some of this tune-up stuff until I found a nice convenient package that specified the steps, in order, and walked me through it (plus provided access to additional programs that do some of the more complicated stuff). While I do provide tips and information here on how to make your computer faster, I also recommend and use Tiit Raag's Fast PC Secrets. This is a reasonably priced full range product, not just a Registry cleaner. It has extensive professionally produced step-by-step videos and PDFs with pictures (my personal choice, particularly after the first or second time I went through the cleanup process). And you'll be getting access to a number of programs which you'll definitely want to use as part of your system tune-up and clean-up.

Please don't tell me the brand new computer you got for Christmas is getting slow and you're already asking yourself how do I speed up my computer? That's just too soon unless you've been downloading an unbelievable amount of junk and have gotten infected already - or that new computer didn't have what it really should have had in terms of hardware.

Now I can and will give you some tips on how to speed up your computer. However, let's get a couple things out of the way first. These days, the CPU speed is rarely an issue unless you are doing heavy duty number manipulation or very intensive graphics without a high end graphics board.

The two main hardware components to be concerned about the hard drive and the RAM (Random Access Memory). The bigger your hard drive the better. It'll take longer to fill up and it will be easier to defragment. Operating systems, start up programs and applications suck up a huge amount of RAM. If you don't have enough memory some programs simply won't run - or they'll be so slow they might as well not be running. And if you run multiple programs, slower yet. 512MB is pretty much the minimum. 1 GB is better. 2GB is even better.

As you use up your RAM, the operating system will swap data to the hard drive - to virtual memory. This slows things down since getting data to and from the hard drive is always slower than getting it from RAM. And if you have your virtual memory set too low, you'll get those annoying messages from the OS about how you're running out and it's increasing the size. By then things have usually gotten really slow.

As you run your computer and particularly as you use the internet, junk starts to accumulate on your hard drive. Windows systems also accumulate junk in the registry. Installing programs often leaves behind temporary files used in the install process and still sitting around taking up space instead of being deleted. There's a lot of sloppy coding out there and we're all victims of poorly designed applications and installation programs.

And, of course, there are quite a few vicious applications out there too. Malware, worms, viruses, browser hijackers, adware. You absolutely have to have anti-virus software and if you've been running without or with a not-so-good anti-virus then you have to at least check your entire hard drive and clean out any nasties. Be sure to use a firewall and a good anti-virus. I'd also suggest software (free) like Spybot Search and Destroy, SpyWare Blaster and maybe Lavasoft's Ad-Aware as well as the monthly malware cleanup program Microsoft distributes.

If you use any P2P networks to download music, video, etc., make sure your anti-virus checks the files. Also those networks will use your hard drive and your CPU (that's how a peer network works) and this can slow down your internet access or other programs if the P2P network is using your computer. While P2P programs should only be using your computer resources when you aren't, what's supposed to happen isn't always what really happens, so be aware.

No matter how good all your anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are stuff can and usually will sneak onto your machine. Keeping your programs updated is essential and running regular scans of your file system are essential parts of how to speed up your computer, keep it running faster and keeping your system and files safe.

A while back when I started having trouble with my machine, I took a look around and found a product called Fast PC Secrets which is a step by step series of videos that walk you through the process of cleaning up and speeding up your PC as well as setting up protection using an excellent (and free) anti-virus program and anti-spyware program. And there's nothing else to buy, no monthly costs. I'll talk some more about it and my experiences with it, but I'll just say now that I've been using it for around six months and every time I run through the cleanup process I get rid of trash and I pick up added disk space. Plus it also includes PDFs not just video in case you prefer to read. Take a look here: Fast PC Secrets.