Spy Sweeper > Ad-aware!?

[Silverbrain]

Anyone have any experiences with Spy Sweeper, trust it or what have you? I have some cumputers in the shop, have some time on my hands and after running a full hdd scan with Adaware 1.81, Personal. defs latest. (199 items found, mostly cookies) ran a trial of Spy Sweeper. 703 items later it was done scanning! W/o removing, ran a spybot S&D scan, found 1 item.

Another incident, a Laptop has been having popups keep coming back, redirections etc. Run the same set of tools, Adaware, Spybot, Hijackthis. Clean all findings. Then throw Spy Sweeper at it, 1154 items later the system is clean. 1154! To me that puts adaware and the others to shame.

Is Spy Sweeper fluffing the results to look good or is my fav spyware remover that far behind the times and needing to be replaced!?

 

[rockerfellerz]

Hmmm... Ad-aware is up to version 6.181, so the one you're running is way out of date(unless you got the ver# wrong?). That said, none of these products catches everything, so using several different ones is a good idea.

If you're going through Hell...keep going... (Winston Churchill)
RocKeRFelLerZ

 

[diogenes10]

Comments:
You get what you pay for. It takes money to live and to put stuff on the net. Spybot is free. Spysweeper has a free version, but they'd like you to buy the paid stuff. A company with a steady stream of revenue can possibly create a more extensive product than someone doing it out of his pocket with an uncertain donation stream. (Note change in marketing philosophy with JV16 powertools as an example here.) Also, someone who wants you to buy their product has to do something to make you think it is better than the competition-in this case a widely recognized free program. They could try to do this with magic and mirrors, or with content.

Experiment:
I have a spybot 1.2 with 2/04 detections I put on a machine that's giving the boss some grief. I downloaded spysweeper and did the update. 2.6.1, build 45, definition 328.

I ran spybot - got dso exploit, 4 items relating to hotbar, and windows media player.

Spysweeper gave me 35 items with 90 traces. Alexa and hotbar, balance of items were cookies with one to four traces apiece.

Back to spybot. Check cookie list - Only 8 of the specific cookies which spysweeper found are listed in spybot cookie list. - but how come spybot didnt list those eight?

Spybot excludes list-cookies, lists all cookies on the system and lets you check what ones you DONT want deleted when spybot clears USAGE TRACKS. Spybot setup-file sets -- usage track and registry reviews are not selected in the default, off the net setup. Revise spybot to include all items in file sets and scan again. This time, as one of the usage track entries in spybot there is a line for 230 cookies in c:\windows\cookies. Since I had none of them checked for saving, it cleared them all.

My opinion-If you set IE to clear temporary internet files on exit and update your spybot cookie save list when you go to sites to want to repeat visit and set up spybot to give you usage track info and then select that for removal -- you'll get just as good or better effect on cookies as you will with spysweeper looking through 21,000 items for all the cookies it knows about. My feeling would then be that most of the other areas spybot covers would do fine too.