Advertising popups are a pain in the butt. You have to sit and look at their lewd ads, waste your time clearing them off the screen, and on top of that your computer runs a ton slower because of them. There's absolutely no upside here except that you're helping line the pockets of some guy that you don't know and probably wouldn't want to have anything to do with anyway.

When your system is infected with adware, you know it. You'll leave the computer for a few minutes, and come back to a screen with a ton of completely unrelated advertisements on it. Because of the way adware works, these are generally low quality, high-paying ads which are, annoyingly enough, generally smut and gambling ads. Not fun at all if your spouse or boss sees them and thinks you're up to something.

Problem is, most people think that anti-virus software is enough to protect your computer from any sort of malware infection. Adware avoids virus protection software's detection because it doesn't actively cripple the computer as much as just annoy the heck out of the user. This is not to say that virus protection is unnecessary, just the opposite: you need both virus and malware protection on your system to be completely safe on today's modern internet.

In order to be properly protected from adware, you need a dedicated program to take care of your system. There are a number of solutions available to you, but there are a few important things that you need to look for. At the end of this article, we've included a link to a few of the best software packages available on the net.

First, free programs are absolutely rubbish. Far too many times have I seen people install a free adware program only to find that it has merely replaced the infection with malware of its own. The people who make these programs have to make money somewhere, so they let you look at a bunch of ads. Not fun.

Second, you need to find something that offers protection of your computer instead of just removing present infections. Active protection prevents adware from ever getting installed on your system, so you never have to waste your time going out of your way to remove that rubbish.

Third, look for something with automatic updates. Without automatic updating, you'll have to waste your time keeping the software up to date, and many times it will fall behind and you'll end up with some kind of new mess on your system because your software is outdated. Don't waste your time, get something that automatically updates for you and you'll be a lot better off.

Finally, look for something with scheduled scans. In addition to active protection of your computer, scheduled scans make sure that absolutely nothing can get installed on your computer. If a new kind of adware is released that manages to get past the active protection filters, scheduled scanning (and automatic updates) will make sure that it doesn't stay there long enough for it to even bother you.