Labs

From a user interface that is simplistic to the point of being almost barren, to the limited help files and even more limited feature set, everything about Spy Cleaner shouts freeware or early beta. Yet this is a long-established commercial product costing only a few pounds less than our Labs Winner, Spyware Doctor. In truth, the two couldn't be further apart: Spy Cleaner took nearly three times as long to complete its scan, finishing last in every test. CPU usage was notably high too, so not only will you be waiting a long for your scans to finish, the system will be less reponsive while it's running.

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Detection (38 per cent) and removal (48 per cent) were both poor, but blocking (22 per cent) was shockingly low.

Analysis of those threats it did uncover was uninformative, especially from the perspective of the level of threat posed, making it hard to know what to do with the spyware components to best secure the system. One example we were faced with displayed a generic 'might be harmful, might not' type message that was full of confidence-busting grammatical and spelling errors: 'we advice to use descretion while deleting them,' for example.

Attempting to access the help files was of little benefit. The website pages you arrive at contain a screenshot-based tutorial that didn't work properly during our tests. And we were unable to uncover any other method of getting support.

On the positive side, there are automatic definition updates (although the whole application has to close to update them each time), a browser-hijack restorer for Internet Explorer, and a working backup and restore facility for deleted components. However, with Microsoft AntiSpyware being both far superior and totally free of charge, we can think of no reason to spend money on Spy Cleaner.