Antispyware – 5 (AVG)

Recently, AVG products have been gaining good market. The AVG antispyware comes in 2 versions, the free one and the commercial one. Looking into its performance, we find that it takes long to complete. It scans as if it were some antivirus tool rather than an antispyware, though there are no criteria to decide this. Nonetheless, it is an effective scanner. Much like Spyware Terminator, it integrates with the right click menu for files and folders.

Antispyware – 4 (Spyware Terminator)

Spyware Terminator is another free antispyware tool. It has got real-time protection including system guard, application guard, and internet guard. It has got impressively low CPU usage, Ad-Aware like interface, which loads fast, is good to look at, and is also quite intuitive and thus easy to use. It scans quite fast much like AdAware. The most interesting part of the results is that they provide details about processes on your system. They recognise a good number of processes and provide you information about them in situ, i.e. you don’t have to look up the net again. It integrates well with the right click menu for files and folders.

Antispyware – 3 (Spyware Doctor)

Spyware Doctor is a good proprietary antispyware. It has got real-time protection, registry clean-up and all. Its spyware definition updates are usually around 4.5 MB and most updates also accompany an update of the scan engine. Its problem is speed and CPU usage. The usual memory usage recorded in task manager for its process is about 80 MB. It slows down the pc to a great extent and if allowed to run at start-up, it lengthens the start-up time too much. On a typical 3 GHz system, it slowed down the start-up time by about 2 minutes. I would not recommend it especially when same performance can be obtained using free tools using much low memory and CPU.

Antispyware – 1 (Adware.LinkMaker)

I have been experimenting with various antispyware products for some time now. I had Spybot-Search and Destroy and Ad-Aware installed. Besides those, there was the antispyware that comes along with ZoneAlarm. Then I tried SpyDefense beta. It showed a spyware called Adware.LinkMaker to be present on my system. After the scan, without removing the spyware I scanned using Ad-Aware, strangely it didn't show this spyware.