Webupon

    What I have done in the past to prevent pop-ups and random stuff showing up on my desktop is I have moved away from the common Internet Explorer and moved to Mozilla Firefox or even Chrome.
   
    What’s nice about Firefox and Chrome is that they block most of you pop-ups. You can also change the settings to be even more strict on what website access you computer and download stuff without you knowing.

    They will help you by informing you when a website is trying to install something onto your computer.

    I would also recommend installing something like the free version of AVG. When you Google something it will put a green check-mark next to the link so you are sure your not going to stumble onto a bad sight that contaminates your computer with garbage.

    I to deal with getting rid of any virus’s that may have been downloaded I run regular scans with Clam-Win. it’s a really nice free virus checker! It automatically updates everyday and you can schedule it to scan when ever you want.

    Now sometimes you do get one of those really bad virus’s where you can’t even boot into windows. What I would recommend in a situation like that is to go and download yourself and ISO of knoppix and run that Live on you computer. In Order to get the ISO and burn it to a CD you will need access to another computer. Weather it be your friends computer, or another one in the house, that really shouldn’t be a problem
   
    Now with the disc in you drive boot up your computer. Now make sure you can boot from a CD. If your not sure just check in your computers manual. Once you boot into the live disk you can view the contents of your Hard Drive. This allows you to back everything up onto lets say a flash drive and save it for when you re-install windows to get rid of the virus. Once everything is backed up its really easy to just re-install Windows with the back up CD that should have come with your computer.

    Now if you sick and tired of Windows I would recommend trying something like Ubuntu. it’s a really user friendly version of Linux and its free. You can download the ISO and bur it to a CD yourself or you can request a free CD mailed to you house!