Anti-spyware advice...

[cass]

I know some of you (all of you) are probably WAY smarter than me when it comes to this program running stuff!

I ran an anti-spyware program thingy, and it came up with alot of tracking cookies, in the category field. I know I should delete those (right?). Some of them came up with "P2P" in the category field. For instance..."limewire". Should I delete that one?

Also "intellicast" which is a weather site that I use, came up with a tracking cookie. Should I delete cookies from sites that I know are safe? Are all tracking cookies the devil?

To quote someone on here that once said (maybe CA GIRL)..."I don't even know enough about this to ask an intelligent question"!

[Teresa_Rae]

As a habit I regularly delete my cookies just to be safe. I delete them everyday from my computer at work and at least once a week at home.

[chicagoans]

Not all cookies are evil. Lots of them are used to save your preferences or user login info.

If you delete all the cookies, then sites where you have saved your login information (for example, this one) will not 'remember' you next time. Likewise sites that save your preferences won't have those (for example, weather.com remembers my zip code so I can click on a link that pulls up weather for my area.)

It's fine to delete all the cookies if you don't mind logging in your user name/password each time you go to a site or entering your preferences every time. I have a bunch of sites with work related logins (not chosen by me but assigned by the site admin) that I don't feel like memorizing, so I keep those cookies.

I like anti-spyware that lets you review and select which cookies to delete or that knows which ones are 'evil' -- for example all the adware ones. The times when I've deleted all cookies, I realize how many sites I go to where I'm used to being automatically logged in. (News sites, for example.) I also tried turning on the cookie notification thing once, and that popped up all the time and became unworkable.

I don't know if this cleared things up for you or just muddied the water! But that's my 2 cents and limited knowledge of cookies.

[cass]

Hey guys, thank you for responding. I'm pretty sure I got most of it figured out. I ran the anti-spy program because I had a virus or something called "perfect defender". After MUCH research, I found a free download to get rid of it. I canceled the anti-spy run, and ran the free program and it removed all of it. When I went back to run the anti-spy, it only came up with like 3 things. I went in and marked my usual hangouts as "safe" and deleted the rest.

I'm running the anti-spy a couple times a day. I think the virus came from emails that I get from Scotland. All of sudden I started getting a lot of phishing thingys from the UK. The person that sends the emails from Scotland had a bug, but she fixed it. No problems now for the last week or so!

Thanks!