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 – 2 (Registry scans)

Almost all antispyware products scan for registry values as traces of spyware activity. NoAdware is especially good at registry clean-up. However, its free version only scans but doesn’t clean. If you are acquainted with registry clean-up using regedit, you may do the clean-up part yourself which of course shall take more time than if the software did it for you. And these registry values are not cleaned by the typical registry clean-up softwares available because they clean obsolete registry values.

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.