Product Reviews

Spyware, adware and related applications have become some of the biggest problems faced by PC owners. It's not just the worry of private data being sent to unknown third parties. A lot of computers taken for repair have nothing wrong with them except spyware slowing them down. If unexpected adverts suddenly appear on your computer, if your home page changes or if search results don't seem to be as useful as they once were, your computer is infected by spyware.

As most anti-virus software doesn't detect these infections, we put three of the best spyware removal tools to test, using four infected PCs to judge success rates.

REMOVAL RESULTS

Comparing the performance of these products is surprisingly difficult. Even when the products find the same program, they differ in the number of traces that they identify and remove. All will remove the important part of the spyware but may leave some clutter behind on your hard disk or in the Registry.

AD-AWARE SE PLUS

The scanning part of Lavasoft's Ad-aware Plus is the same as in its free Ad-aware Personal. The difference between the two is in the Ad-Watch program, which blocks undesirable websites, tracks cookies and attempts to block the undesirable Registry changes made as spyware tries to install itself.

Ad-aware has always been a fairly effective spyware and adware scanner. It was not quite as effective at clearing up minor traces, though. We found that while Ad-aware removes applications, it leaves behind some of their Registry entries and a few data files.

ETRUST PESTPATROL

ETrust PestPatrol detected large amounts of spyware. However, many of its results come from recording all the traces of programs such as Kazaa that, although supported by adware, are not adware themselves. PestPatrol even marks all MP3 files in Kazaa shared folders as 'pests' and, if you don't check carefully, it will delete all your downloaded music. To make a fair comparison, our results table excludes these items.

On the other hand, PestPatrol found many Trojans (often used by spyware), which the other programs did not detect. However, most anti-virus applications will find these. On all test systems it missed some spyware that both Ad-aware and Spy Sweeper found. Deleting pests proved a slow process, sometimes taking hours and

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many reboots.

SPY SWEEPER

Webroot's Spy Sweeper has a slick user interface and feels very professional. It also found the largest amount of spyware. The high number of traces found was mainly due to the detail. Once it found problems it deleted almost every trace they had left on the system. Spy Sweeper also has comprehensive shields to prevent spyware from getting on your system in the first place.

PROBLEMS THAT REMAIN

While Spy Sweeper, PestPatrol and Ad-aware each found pests that the others did not, our tests found some significant pests remained on almost all our test systems even after we had used all three of these products. There are some nasty pieces of spyware out there that can make your computer hard to use and are particularly difficult to remove.

SOME ESSENTIAL FREE TOOLS

Spybot Search & Destroy, a free program from www.safer-networking.org, uses significantly different methods to identify problem software. As a result it finds some infections that the other three applications missed.

Even then, after we had run all four programs, problems with pop-ups remained on some systems. To clean these we had to turn to yet another free tool, HijackThis from www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html.

HijackThis simply lists modifications to standard Internet Explorer settings and the Windows startup programs list. It needs some expertise to run it as it asks you to decide whether an entry is good or bad, but there are several websites, including http://forums. tomcoyote.org and http://forums.spywareinfo.com, where novices can post HijackThis logs and get advice. By using HijackThis we were able to identify, and often remove, the problems the spyware removers had missed.

By the time you read this, Webroot should have released Spy Sweeper 3.5, which will include a similar feature, but with advice on each entry.

KEEPING YOUR SYSTEMFREE OF SPYWARE

In addition to their scanning ability, all three of the commercial applications and Spybot Search & Destroy have modules that monitor attempts to change your system files. Whenever a program tries to change key Internet Explorer settings or tries to add a new program to the startup list, the monitor should warn you.

verdict

For the best all-round protection our vote goes to Spy Sweeper, which cleaned more problems than either Ad-aware or PestPatrol and did a good job of cleaning up all changes made by these pests. Its monitors were also effective and should prevent almost all spyware getting on your system in the first place. However, even Spy Sweeper was not totally effective on its own. To clean a spyware-infested system completely you will also need the free tools Spybot Search & Destroy and HijackThis.

For those on a tight budget the combination of the free Ad-aware Personal, HijackThis and Spybot Search & Destroy should prove almost as effective.