Labs

Spybot Search & Destroy is a free utility that many PC experts recommend should be part of your arsenal against spyware threats. Although it has a couple of real-time protection features, it doesn't provide the same sort of protection that the commercial products do. For this reason it is really useful only after the event of a spyware infection, rather than as a preventative measure.

An Immunize feature does let you configure Internet Explorer so that it blocks sites known to host spyware. The SDHelper system also tries to prevent Internet Explorer from downloading bad files, while the

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optional TeaTime feature tries to discover and block running spyware processes. Together, these attempt to monitor the system for spyware in real time.

In practice, Spybot Search & Destroy does not provide a useful level of real-time protection. It failed to detect any of our samples as we downloaded them, and neither did it recognise the spyware when we ran a manual scan. Infecting the system with some spyware and then running a scan did get some results. For the reasons we've mentioned in the Ad-Aware SE Personal review, this is hardly an ideal situation. We'd prefer our anti-spyware software to prevent infections rather than just trying to help afterwards.

If your goal is to create a pack of free software on a CD that you can carry around and use to help friends disinfect their PCs, then this is a useful addition. It will find and remove some threats, as will Ad-Aware. Add a copy of HijackThis! (www.merijn.org) and you're on your way to becoming an anti-spyware first-aider. But if you need to protect your own PC, ignore this kind of scanner and install an anti-spyware utility with full real-time protection.