To Prevent Adware, Never Let Your Guard Down

File this one under food for thought. The PC owner who describes his experiences here travels for business a lot. He also is a game player. Games makers, he says, now require players to have the disk in the hard drive as a copy protection step…
Often, gamers use workarounds because it is cumbersome to carry around the disks and having them spinning in the hard drive cuts battery life. Unfortunately, the workaround he used decimated his laptop with adware, which he classifies as a form of spyware. He spent two days cleaning the machine — though he eventually had to reinstall the operating system anyway. Laptop owners, gamers or not, should use only trusted sites, create backups of everything, make sure security software is up-to-date and, most of all, be careful.

Link: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=389&blogid=4

 

Anything you download off the internet that seems shady, say ROMs for instance, are prone to being viruses or spyware. If I ever download a rom, legally of course, because I do indeed have that game, I always check for spyware and virus afterwards and I scan the file itself with my Avast antivirus.

No offense to that guy, but that was pretty dumb of him. Discs aren't that bad anyway... even if they do make battery life less.. i wouldnt risk losing all my stuff for that.