Webroot Spy Sweeper 4

A year is a long time in the anti-spyware business, and both the competition and the prey have moved on since Spy Sweeper 3.5 made it onto our A List. Version 4 does see some improvement in scanning times, although not the four-fold increase that Webroot suggests is possible: our tests placed it sixth with a middling six minutes, 58 seconds.

Automated definition downloads are a welcome addition but par for the course these days, as is the improved scheduling on offer. This just leaves the improved 'Smart Shields' real-time protection, but this still caught only 48 per cent of threats (fourth highest).

Behind the scenes, Phileas, the industry's first fully automated spyware research system, scans millions of web pages a day looking for new threat fingerprints. To a certain extent, it works: Spy Sweeper 4 detected 82 per cent of the spyware on our system and successfully removed 80 per cent, making it the third most accurate in our tests. The problem for Webroot is that Spyware Doctor performed even better.

The technical support is excellent, but hopefully you won't need it: Spy Sweeper is highly configurable without being overly complex, and there's detailed information about threats from the website knowledge base. Where the program starts to fall behind the competition is in ease of use, with poor alert handling being one example: system tray notifications provide little detail and the only alternative is for the whole main window to appear.

In the end, Spyware Doctor and CounterSpy outperform it on every test, yet Spy Sweeper is more expensive than both.