What to believe?
Teresa Pfeiff

Do you ever see pop-ups like this telling you that your computer is infected with harmful Spyware and you should click yes to remove it? Pop-ups like this will do more damage to your system if you click yes than just ignoring them by clicking the "X" in the upper right hand corner.

If you ever see a pop-up in the middle of the screen, such as this one, it is bogus. Do not respond to it. By clicking yes you could be opening your computer up to more infectious Spyware than you bargained for. Simply close the window and update your Adaware and Spybot immediately. Then run both of them to get rid of the nasty Adware and Spyware on your system. Unfortunately, there aren't any nice computer hackers out there that are monitoring your system for you and giving you free advice in the form of a pop-up.

I have had clients tell me that they have received an e-mail from Microsoft telling them they need to click on the link below to update their computer. This too is bogus. It would be great if Microsoft e-mailed all of us to tell us our computers are in need of updating but, unfortunately they do not. Remember, if you do not know who the sender of the e-mail is then DELETE IT IMMEDIATELY and DO NOT OPEN IT! If you do receive a suspicious looking e-mail let the other people you work with know who it was from and what the subject was. Also, mention this to your network administrator as well.

There are some things that pop-up which you can believe and trust. One of those things includes the little balloon that pops up near the clock on your taskbar. The most common one is the balloon that tells you, "updates are ready for your computer, click to install these updates." It is safe to click on this balloon and install the updates, if you so desire.

This message is related to the settings on your Windows Automatic Updates. If your Automatic Updates are set to, "Download updates for me, but let me chose when to install them" you will receive a balloon popping up from the area of your clock on the task bar telling you that there are updates available. Once you go ahead and start the updates you will get another balloon like this:

You can turn off the Automatic Updates. In fact, some businesses want that feature turned off because sometimes updates can conflict with other software on the system. One example of this was Microsoft's Service Pack 2. SP2 fixed a lot of bugs but it also caused several software conflicts. Once the software companies caught up with SP2 and released updates it was then acceptable to install the SP2 update. So, to eliminate that ever happening again Windows Automatic Updates are turned off and the system administrator can pick and chose which and when to update the computers on their network.

The Automatic Updates settings can be found on a system running Windows XP under Control Panel, Automatic Updates. Talk to your system administrator before adjusting these settings.