Adware

Be ware of the ever present adware in everything you download. While you don't have to read the end user agreement, make sure you are not agreeing to more than one. My wife or my Brother one download some adware to my laptop (which I rarely use). It was a pain to get rid of but I finally managed it and found out a few things in the process.

First I found a program called adwcleaner. This program is fairly nice. Not that I'm trying to convince anyone, but my work buddy used malware bytes and couldnt get rid of it. This did. Also note that this is a FREE software, if you got one that asks for payment it is an adware program.

After I ran this I found a few other adware programs that were installed and set to boot up. It was giving me a hard time so I tried using this tool called jrt (junkware removal tool). After that didn't get rid of everything I played with windows for a bit.

I found malwarebytes and used it, but I also found an option in msconfig, so search around in services etc and see where else those dang things put stuff.

It is the one called diagnostic setup. I clicked this and was able to reboot my computer. Malwarebytes got rid of the leftover stuff from the adware but there was still 2 programs that would run. They were in the c:\programdata file. They also constantly ran a process. I was able to delete them once I booted up in diagnostic mode.

Something else to do is to set system restore points before you download anything and then just restore to there, or read the prompts/licencing as they generally tell you they are going to install unless you click no.

JRT does make a nice quick log of everything it got, as well as did a decent job of cleaning up a different time that I ran it.

HitmanPro also did a decent job of cleaning up but it is not free, although you can get a one time free license for it.

That's my update. Thanks for listening!
Oh and a link to all of the programs I used can be found here:
http://malwaretips.com/blogs/adpeakproxy-exe-removal/