Spyware Reviews

There is a lot of discussion on the Internet and in the media about spyware at the present. A small industry has grown up in the last few years to produce anti-spyware software to combat this threat.

But whereas all the software companies are good at saying how good their products are, it's not that usual to get spyware reviews from the ordinary guy in the street. So here are my own personal experiences with spyware software.

First of all it is worth pointing out that I have a one-year-old PC but haven't had any cause to think that there may be a problem with it. It's been pretty stable and there has been no noticeable loss in speed or weird pop-ups appearing (all of which can be a sign of a problem with spyware).

After researching the various products available on the Internet, I decided to try Spybot-Search and Destroy. As well as having a great name, this product has a good reputation and a long history. It was created in 2000, which is a long time ago as far as anti-spyware software. It is free to use but there is an option to make a donation to the creator of the software.

Downloading the product was easy. You are directed to a mirror site where you can get access to the download. The program installed first time without a hitch. When I got the program open, it directed me to make a backup of my registry before taking any further action. Your computer registry is a common place for spyware to reside, so this makes sense.

The software comes with a training tutorial and help files. As this is a free program I was quite impressed with this. This is an area where free software creators often take shortcuts.

Then I ran the scanner to detect any spyware that was on my machine. This scan is similar to running an anti-virus scan. The scan took 14 minutes. Some other spyware reviews have reported that the scanning takes up a lot of system resources. I was able to work on documents with the scan running in the background and didn't really notice any lose in performance.

Then it was the moment of truth. 87 spyware programs found on my computer! I was then given the option of deleting these. This is a simple 1-click process.

To update the product there is an updater application that you need to run. You then choose a mirror site to download from and choose the updates that you want to download. Not as easy to use as an automatic updater that does everything in the background, but what do you expect from a free program?

In summary, I found Spybot-Search and Destroy easy to use and it hasn't caused any problems with my computer. I suggest you also read other spyware reviews to see if it is the right choice for you.