Last week’s column ended with methods to ignore low threat intruders, rather than delete them and risk damaging your computer. We learned how to ensure that Ad-watch opens each time we reboot so that the intruders will have a more difficult time invading our computers. Still, we’re left with cookies that pop-up advertisements while we’re surfing, Windows registry entries that direct emails enticing us to click potentially dangerous attachments or web sites, and possibly more. The accumulation of registry entries slows your computer. The registry becomes larger and fragmented. I’ll introduce a few new tools to mitigate some of these irritants.

The week before last I discussed a class of intruders known interchangeably as Adware, Spyware and Malware. At the end of the column I introduced a particularly insidious subset of these intruders known as ‘dialers’. This week we’ll learn how to deal with dialers. There are a number of choices, depending on how much work you want to do, how adept you are around a computer, and the severity of the threat.

Last week’s column ended with a promise: “Next week we can discuss further issues, such as what course of action to take if an intruder is a dialer. You sure don’t want expensive calls made to porn sites off your computer.” I’m going to break that promise. In the last two weeks I’ve received fewer intruders attempting to invade my computer through my email.