Halfway working through using your computer you found that your machine is giving you a very sudden slow performance.
It does not indicate you early enough but by the time you know it, your system is already as slow as s tortoise with something running secretly in the background.
If you still insist that you are not noticing anything weird happening to your system, then you will soon see a pile of pop up advertisements whenever you open a new page in your browser.
Colleagues start to hint you with the possibility of spyware attacks on your system, and hurry you to try the latest anti spyware programs.
It sounded so familiar.
Spyware are usually programs that are installed in a system without the acknowledgment of the user.
Usually spread while the user is installing freeware or shareware, which are often downloaded free from the net.
Other ways of spreading also includes fooling the users to install the spyware instead of the software they wanted to install at first.
Many spyware actually logs user information such as web page they visited, or the types of web page they usually visit.
Advertisements are then sent to the user's computer, appearing as pop ups that annoys users whenever they click their intended page.
Clicking on the pop up windows might just bring them to more spyware infested sites.
Spywares causes the computer to slow down drastically.
It takes up resources without the knowledge of the user, running on the background, sending and retrieving data between the user's computer and the company that sent out the spyware to log user's information.
Low in memory, slow processor speeds, and also a decrease in network traffic is what expected to be happening in a computer which has just been hit.
To avoid getting spywares is easy.
Rely only on trusted freewares from re known companies.
Never try to click on a pop up advertisement.
If a suspected ware is running in your computer, use a spyware detector such as Spybot Search and Destroy to find out the culprit.