Jackie's Aunt stopped in last night to spend the night.  She brought along her son's computer that had been acting strange.  Specifically, the machine was operating at a crawl. 

I manage to pop open the window's process manager after waiting 5 minutes for the machine to come out of hibernation.  The window takes another minute to display - yep something's definately up with this sucker.  Sure enough I see a bunch of suspicious processes running (after awhile you just get used to knowing which processes window's needs), which happen to be taking up 99 percent of this machine's CPU.  I close a bunch of these out, and wa-la, the machine is working fine again.

Now to help secure it for the future.  I open up Norton's Antivirus - whoops the subscription has expired.  Now I'm wondering, why the hell would you let this expire?  Hasn't everyone pretty much heard about how unsecure the Window's OS is?  I mean, the least you could do would be to try to help it out with some good ole Anti-Virus protection.

At least, I'd think so.  Jackie's father also had similar problems about a year ago.  I took a look at his machine and noticed that he was running a FTP site, along with some IRC bots and other misc haxor junk.  After fumbling around and finding out it was someone from russia, I just recommended a format.  I also instructed him to buy firewall software along with antivirus tool.  Sure enough, I haven't been back over to his house since.

Anyhoo, I decide to download AdAware's tool and SpyBot S&D to plop on the machine.  The results were staggering.  This machine was infected with over 100 spyware products.  After 2 hours of disinfecting, the machine should be a lot better off.  Of course, I won't be able to see the results as she's leaving today, but I'll give her a call in a week and see if everything's still kosher. 

One more thing: I dumped the above software on my gaming machine (that I don't use primarily to surf [and then only through FireFox]) and it was infected with 1 piece of spyware.  I think I'm going to go through each machine and install this stuff...