An average technician repair for a computer with ‘viruses and spyware’ will cost you anywhere between $100 – $200 minimum.

But did you know, all most techs are doing is running scans for said viruses and spyware that usually resolve the problem?  Did you know these tools are free?  Some technicians are making a fortune doing incident repairs on computers that maintenance scanning would do wonders for.

Before you take your computer in to get fixed, or call in the calvary, download these free tools and run the scans associated with them.  If this doesn’t resolve your problem, then call in the good guys.

If it’s a trojan horse, then here are some free tools to try and remove it.

AVG Anti-Virus http://free.avg.com (Never pay for an Anti-virus program!  There are plenty of free alternatives.  This is the best one for my needs and it works really well)

Ad-aware from Lavasoft http://tr.im/hhNX (for Ad-aware)

Spybot Search and Destroy http://tr.im/hhOd (for Spyware)

CCleaner (which is awesome for getting rid of temp files and freeing up harddrive space)  http://tr.im/hhOx

Another tip to greatly reduce spyware and adware is switching to a non-internet explorer browser (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera works) and loading an ad-blocking plugin.   I like Mozilla and Ad-Block Plus, along with the Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-out plugins.