Few years ago the Polish edition of the Chip Magazine did an in-depth comparison on 30 most popular anti-spyware engines testing them on over 50 different criteria. If I remember correctly Adaware Pro, Adaware Free, and Spybot were all in the top 5.

They did it two years ago or so and Spybot barely made it in the top ten. So yes, I think they are slipping, and there are be better free tools out there now. That’s why I asked for people’s favorites.

Defender inherited one of the strongest scaning engines from Giant or whoever owned that code before them. I remember people were singing their praises and worrying that Microsoft will totally ruin this fine software. Not sure if they improved or got worse since then.

I know however that while Defender finds the spyware made by certain companies, it sometimes will switch the default action to “ignore” instead of “remove” for some shady reason – so it’s best to watch it.

i dont think Spybot is a good adwareremover. i saw a comparison once and it was almost the worst program.
Does anyone know aboput defender?

Heh… You know, I never really caught anything from a torrent. I like the sites which let you comment on the torrent (like Torrentspy) because the community will usually make some noise if the files are corrupted, fake, or infected.

I always thought that most people get infected when they go fishing for pr0n and get tricked into clicking some shady banners. Googling for pr0n is pretty much useless these days anyway. As with torrents it is better to find communities devoted to password sharing or uploading and linking to full length movies. :P

I like to keep Spybot just in case. It usually doesn’t find anything but tracking cookies, but every once in a while something might slip through.

:D When you get less then legal files online, Spybot is a must.
And yeah, its funny you posted this, I was going to post as simmilar blog a few weeks ago when i updated my spybot.

I usually install Spybot and Windows Defender on most of the machines I work with. One thing I hate about Defender is that it likes to run scans in the background without telling you – whicu amounts to a huge memory and CPU drain.

You switched to Vista? Ugh… I’m not touching that thing for now. How is it?

I don’t use any, even when running Windows :D

I exclusively use Firefox + Adblock + Filterset.G updater for all web browsing (except when testing local copies of my websites in IE7). I don’t install random software that might be useful/cool/fun either, mainly because I never find a need for any of it ;)

I did scan my XP install with AdAware (which is what I would use on friends’/relatives’ PCs), which had been going for about a year, just before I switched to Vista, and all it found was about two tracking cookies.

I used AdAware adnd SpywareBlaster before, but I never tried Spyware Doctor. I will have to check it out. Thanks for the tip. :)

I always had that problem and assumed it was because of something dodgy I’d installed. Nice to know there’s a fix.

I use a mix of SpyBot, AdAware and Spyware Blaster. Have also used Spyware Doctor a few times before too, thats quite good.