I removed Starware from a photographer’s computer this week. The computer was oppressively slow and Outlook was crashing a lot. My client couldn’t work efficiently, since the interruptions slowed down the work he could do in a day. He was sooo frustrated.

Starware took a tenacious hold of the operating system. It’d installed hundreds of registry keys, files, and applications. The apps were running in the background, making the compute insufferably slow. All for one harmless-looking toolbar.

If you must have a toolbar cluttering up your browser, use Google’s or Yahoo’s. And indeed, it seems you must have both of them, since they are omni-present, appearing out of nowhere onto your browser with one mindless click of the mouse. It’s hard not to have them, whether you want them or not. But I digress..

After removing Starware, the computer acted normally and Outlook worked again. The photographer could get on with his business.

Starware is a good name, since it was designed by someone much like a character out of Star Wars, not a hero like Hans Solo, but a Darth Vader who callously likes to muck up people’s lives and businesses by damaging their computers. Someone who’s sold out to the dark side.

To remove Starware, I used Malwarebytes. To download Malwarebytes, click here. Or go there by typing http://malwarebytes.org in your browser’s address bar. Be sure to update before you scan.

And take care out there.

Oh, baby, baby it’s a wild web.