ISP gurus share their advice on the best way to keep your PC and your customers' PCs free of spyware.

[July 1, 2004]

On the ISP-Tech list in May, PB posted the following message:

I feel like starting a debate, but perhaps learn something at the same time. Which program is better? As far as finding ad/spy/malware, user friendliness, etc. I use Ad-Aware religiously, and recommend it to all of our users, but am thinking about trying out Spybot Search & Destroy, wondering what you all have to say about it.

[CS replied] "We run them both. Both are about 98 percent effective but each finds things the other misses. Also, the newest version of Norton Antivirus identifies a good portion of spyware and has actually caught things Spybot and Adaware missed. However, the one thing Spybot offers is prevention. Lots of nice little tools for actually blocking spyware, proteting your host file, registry, etc. I wouldn't give either one up but if someone forced my to choose, I'd have to go with Spybot. It just works better for us. YMMV."

[SW disagreed] "Neither of the two are perfect. You must use them both to be effective."

[EF added] "I think this debate is incomplete because I just had a problem only CWShredder could solve. All these tools are complementary."

[CS summarized] "Webroot's Spysweeper is the "best" program (i.e. finds the most items); however, it is commerical. ($29, but has a 30 day trial version with 1 free update, and will remove a lot of items, then you can generally keep clean with Ad-Aware).

Ad-Aware is the easiest to use for an end user. Spybot works well, but has a clunky interface that confuses end-users. But real-time scanning is nice. (Spysweeper does this as well)

Norton AV does find 1 or 2 really tricky spywares that "nothing" elseremoves. But I would not run Norton as a general rule. The 2004 version is garbage, and extreme system resource hog, has compatibility issues.

We suggest Grisoft's AVG 6.0 Free Edition, works really well for viruses, and is free.

As EF says, you do want to run the Cool Web Shredder. Cool web is nasty, and definitely the CWShredder does the best at getting rid of it. One other tool you can't live without, particularly with the hard to find browser hijacks, and host-exploits is a program called Hijack-This!"

PB was not completely happy with the answers:

"We (I do mean all of us) do use all of these tools, but really what I was looking for was what software everyone liked better Spybot or Ad-Aware. I agree to keep fully clean one would need to run all of these, but our customers aren't always the brightest light bulbs in the 4 pack if you catch my drift. Ad-Aware in my opinion is more user friendly than Spybot, but they pretty much do the same thing from what I've tested. Plus it's easier to find in my opinion too. Much easier to tell people ad-aware.com which links right to a download page, than having them go to spywareinfo.com and search for a link."

—End