Clean software for Windows machines

First, clean the machine with one, or better yet two, adware cleaners. Ad Aware is a good place to start. (google for it)

How to practice safer computing

Then make sure you don't install known adware/spyware.
wikipedia's list

Don Davidson's list with links to removal tools

Then go get some clean, free and cheap sofware at cleansoftware.org

Don't forget to pick up the free antivirus software while you're there, install it and turn it on.

Why do I post so much about spyware and antivirus tools? Because I know many of you are using computers that are slowed to a crawl by it and that others have a computer that's been completely crippled to the point it won't work anymore.

Why Bother? Getting a Life in a Locked Down World

"To view our times as decadent and dangerous, to mistrust the government, to imagine that those in power are not concerned with our best interests is not paranoid but perceptive; to be depressed, angry or confused about such things is not delusional but a sign of consciousness. Yet our culture suggests otherwise.

"But if all this is true, then why not despair? The simple answer is this: despair is the suicide of imagination. Whatever reality presses upon us, there still remains the possibility of imagining something better, and in this dream remains the frontier of our humanity and its possibilities. To despair is to voluntarily close a door that has not yet shut. The task is to bear knowledge without it destroying ourselves, to challenge the wrong without ending up on its casualty list. "You don't have to change the world," the writer Colman McCarthy has argued. "Just keep the world from changing you."

[more excerpts at Ratical.org Click link above to get the book from Powell's}