Our Spyware Story

One day I turned on our computer and thought it strange that several things had changed. This happened before we knew very much about spyware.  As I scanned through our "Bookmarks", the first thing I noticed was that it looked like our list of bookmarks was much shorter than usual.  I noticed that the list of bookmarks was only about twenty long instead of fifty. 

As I began reading the bookmark folders, searching for a particular one, I noticed that the folders were labeled differently than they had been the day before. In fact, they were very different; there were now bookmarks which contained pornography, sites about enlarging certain body parts, and other offensive sites which we did not have bookmarked. I was shocked. How could this happen? Everything was fine yesterday!

The next thing that I observed was that our Internet Explorer browser was opening to a different website, instead of what we had it set to, Google.com. Upsetting? Yes. Now what to do about it… Ok, well it is easy enough to change your browser setting back, so we did that. Unfortunately, every time we restarted the computer our homepage would reset back to the undesirable website. Very frustrating!

We tried all the free spyware removal programs in our attempt to rectify the problems, but nothing seemed to work. Next we downloaded Webroot Spy Sweeper, which did find spyware on our system, but it didn’t solve all the problems that we were currently having. We were having a hard time figuring out where the spyware came from.

Through many hours of frustrating research over several weeks we determined that Search2000.com was the source of our problems. Once that was determined we went to Search2000.com and downloaded their uninstall program. We ran the Search2000 uninstall program and thought everything was fine, until we looked at our bookmarks which we had recreated since the first incident occurred. The uninstall program had erased our Favorites/Bookmarks on both Internet Explorer and Netscape. Great, here we go again. We had to recreate the bookmarks again! Hmmm, isn’t there a way to back these up??

After three very frustrating weeks and many hours lost, we finally had our browser and bookmarks back the way we wanted them. We did learn a lot along the way. We now know how important it is to have an anti-spyware program running. We would not have experienced these problems if we would have had a spyware removal program on our computer. We also learned how to back up our bookmarks, which is very important, since we don't enjoy recreating them. If you would like more information on backing up your bookmarks, click here.

So anyway, our experience with spyware is what led to the creation of this website. Along the way we also discovered that some Spyware is actually sold as Anti-Spyware Removal programs. Our goal is to provide quality information and reviews which will help you avoid and/or remove spyware, and not get scammed into buying more spyware. You will only find the best of the best listed at 1stSpywareRemoval.com.