OT: Any way to forget Gator?

[BBegemott]

I have no more patience to fight those dataminers (Gator, Claria, Sydoor [sp?] and others) any more. Whatever i do, they get themselves installed on my PC. I remove them with Ad-aware, but it helps permanently only- for a couple of days.
What i am interested in- does anybody know a way to get rid of them once and for ever? How do you deal with them? Let them live in your PC or maybe you have some kind of super-duper utility installed that prohibits all Gator-like activities? Please share your experience. Any input about fighting dataminers is the most welcome.

[Arkcon]

I have never gotten any of them.

I usually surf with Firefox, the newest implematation of Firebird, which was a stripped down Version of Mozilla, which (IIRC) was written by the people who wrote Netscape before AOL made it a mess of bloat code.

Recently, I used IE to check on someone's website here, and continued to surf a bit elsewhere. Sheesh, I was getting tons of port probes, just from using IE. That all went away when I switched back to Firefox.

By the way, I never use P2P networks, and my email is all web-based.

Best of luck.

[Slynky]

I use SpyBot-S&D Here, I think.

It might help out.

Also, here are some specific instructions for removal as found at SARC.

Good luck!

[dogscoff]

install a firewall, like zonealarm, then you can at least stop them from using your internet connection.

[Roanon]

Dont use Internet Explorer. There are tons of better and safer alternatives.

[dogscoff]

But if you don't use IE you can't see my fiction website!! (Due to my crappy javascript)