Antispyware Help

[n8chavez]

There are a couple of question I have regarding antispyware application and now that I have given up on CounterSpy 1.5, beacuse of the high memory and CPU useage, I guess now would be a good time to ask them. I currently am using VBA32 3.5 beta and RegRun II gold and processguard 3.15. How important is any antispyware product with active protection given this setup? I have tried virtually every antispyware product there is and most of them at the top of the teir, CounterSpy, MS antispyware, Spyware Doctor and spysweper, seem to all be suffering from the same problem; resource requirements. Is I do need an antispyware product what would you recommend?


I have trialed Zero spware 2005 and it seemed pretty cool but I have no data as to it's effectiveness? Any thought?

[ErikAlbert]

ZeroSpyware was blacklisted on the famous list of rogue softwares in the past, but has been de-listed.
http://www.spywarewarrior.com/rogue_anti-spyware.htm
-{ Quote: "Note on ZeroSpyware: ZeroSpyware was listed on this page because of concerns with false positives and the nature of its detections and scan reporting (1, 2). In early September 2004, a new version of ZeroSpyware was released. Testing with this new version indicates not only that the problems with earlier versions have been satisfactorily resolved, but that the application does provide usable anti-spyware protection. Thus, we can no longer consider ZeroSpyware to be "rogue/suspect" anti-spyware." }-

I wouldn't advice ZeroSpyware, because my experience with de-listed AS scanners wasn't good.
Keep also in mind, that even de-listed AS scanners, don't always REMOVE malware, unless you buy the software, which is TYPICAL for rogue softwares.
Legitimate AS scanners never do that, they always offer you a trial version, that detects and removes malware.
My opinion about de-listed AS scanners : once a thief, always a thief. :)
The ones you mentioned in your post are all good.

EDIT :
The freewares Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D are also good. Did you ever try them ?
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/mirrors/index.html

[Vikorr]

Hi

That's a fairly decent setup. How much protection a person needs depends much on what they do on their computer (eg internet banking, ebay, visit porn sites, and you'll need better protection), their habits (eg you research a program before downloading it on the net, and download from the home webpage), and their own comfort level with their security.

If you are looking to reduce the chances of not having spyware on your computer, but are worried about resources, there's a number of things that won't use resources up on your computer that will help <sorry, not certain which antispyware is most resource efficient realtime, so I'll let you know about the other things you can do - if you alredy know them, just ignore below>

These are all free, and don't use any extra resources :
-Harden your IE settings : http://www.spywarewarrior.com/uiuc/btw/ie/ie-opts.htm, and use Spyware Blaster and IE-SPYAD
-or use an alternative broswer like firefox www.mozilla.org

Use a Hosts file http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm
Sp

You could set up a limited user account - http://www.utexas.edu/its/security/personal/windows/winxp.html
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Sandboxie is a free sandbox program that may interest you <havent' searched for the link though>