What is malware? Malware is a type of software that enters into your computer without you knowing and it performs many different malicious (the mal in malware stands for malicious, hence why it is bad).
Spyware, which is often associated with malware, is software that is designed to collect information on you like your passwords, usernames and possibly credit card information.
In this article, to keep things simple were going to stick with just talking about malware.
There is an increasing amount of computers out there that have malware running on them without the users even knowing about it.
The make the situation any bit worse, this is one of the most common bottlenecks as to why some computers run slow.
This is why it is absolutely critical that you have some form of protection against malware.
I personally prefer to have 2 forms of protection.
One piece of software that I have is designed to prevent malware from entering into my computer and the other is designed to scan and remove malware that could possibly be on my computer.
The first program is called Malware Bytes Anti-Malware (just do a Google search for them).
This is the program that I use to scan my computer of any malware infections on the computer and it works perfectly.
When you download the program, just perform a full scan so that it look through all of the files on your hard drive to see if they are malware or malware related.
After that scan is done, if you want to do another scan in the future, a simply quick scan should do the trick.
The second program that I use is called Spyware Blaster (just do a Google search for it).
This is a program that is used to protect your computer by trying to stop programs from getting their way into your computer.
All you have to do is to just download and install the program and it will provide you with full protection.
Just make sure to click on the Protection Status button and select Enable All Protection (its at the bottom).
There is however, one downside to using the free version of this software - you have to manually go in and update it.
Just click on the Updates button and select Check for Updates.
I have ran many different scan's on peoples computers in the past and I have found that most users computers are infected with malware.
Chances are that if you don't have any protection on your computer then your computer has malware on it which could potentially be slowing down your computer.
The two pieces of software that I recommended are free to use and work really well so I highly suggest that you use them to protect your computer.