CounterSpy 1.5.77

At first I didn't think it made any difference about Ewido scan. The Mem usage for the Sun services have been at 76,000 since I rebooted. I just ran an Ewido memory scan. Now in Task Man. the Sun total Mem. usage has dropped from 76,000 to 9,280. What is going on?

 

Looks like I am not in any sort of rush to upgrade. But then again, maybe I will since I do not run CS on my system as resident protection. I just simply don't feel the need to. On demand scans are about it for me.

 

Exactly like me

But I thought that this new version will have a great improvement on resources and maybe I will can use it on active protection, but was the opposite...

If this situation didn't change, nor for on-demand I will use it...

 

Maybe CS holds the memory and only releases it when another application demands it?

 

After beta testing this product from the time that it was in pre-beta until its release yesterday all I can say is that I really don't understand how it works. I did the majority of testing on a WinXP box with a 1gHz PIII and 768mB RAM. All the way through I was concerned about the high resource usage as watched in ProcessExplorer although it never seemed to impact my system. I was especially concerned about the advertised minimum system specs and didn't see how they could possibly support an app using resources of this magnitude.

A couple of weeks ago I rescued a pristine HP Pavilion from the curbside trash pickup that had a 566mHz Celeron, 64mB RAM, and Win98SE. This is about as close as I am going to get to the Counterspy minimums so decided to test it for myself. Counterspy 1.5.70beta was installed after installing Sygate personal firewall and AVG antivirus. All active protection monitors were enabled and I was able to do network file transfers and general browsing even while conducting scans. Since that time I have upgraded first to 1.5.73beta and yesterday to 1.5.77. I am certainly not going to claim that the system runs well but look at the RAM. I was actually surprised that it even installed let alone ran reasonably. The real surprise was that CS seemed to use less CPU on the 98SE system than on the XP.

I have watched this thing for months now using ProcessExplorer and am still confused. It will start out after a scan with really high RAM usage which decreases over time. CPU usage will spike really high but then spike lower when other apps are running. I have run simultaneous scans with both CS and AdAware without any appreciable effect on scan times. At this time the only conclusion that I can come to is that CS will use any available resources but doesn't necessarily demand them. That almost sounds lame to me but it is the best way that I can explain it at the moment.

 

I just got the usual pre-formatted letter of response from Counterspy. They quote the expected resource usage and pretty much seem dismissive of this being a problem. Just for that I guess I will be dismissive of their response and uninstall the program. I think I will take a squared for a spin since it tackles spyware/malware on some level. Back to using Adaware and Spybot with Spywareblaster. I also have Ewido for on the fly scans. I keep away from Internet Explorer and solely use Firefly/Firefox anyway...

 

Considering that some may uninstall Counterspy, is there still a problem of uninstalling Counterspy if you have MSAS also installed? There was once a problem uninstalling either if both were on your computer.

Jerry

 

Two things to be aware of with A-Squared:

1) No logs are generated so look at the results carefully before closing the scan results.

2) There is no quarantine option so check all detections carefully before deleting anything.

 

Excellent question. There shouldn't be since the CS architecture has changed from that used by MWAS. At the same time I have not seen any results of this being attempted. I did see one user who reported that installing 1.5.77 broke his GiantAS install so you should probably be prepared for anything.

 

For those who are only interested in using Counterspy as an on-demand scanner I have developed a procedure for preventing SunServer.exe from being added to the registry as a startup item. It is not a perfect solution but does prevent processes from respawning. It is available here. Comments are welcome.

 

I beta tested this 1.5 too but I've given up on CS. That resource hungry type of crap was having the memory problems from the start. Loads of people complained about it on the beta site and what Sunbelt did was closing down most of the threads and start all over Not with the program but with the beta forum...

And now they released this thing with still the same memory problems. What a waste.

 

That is what I already make a long time ago...
I disabled all the CounterSpy entries in WinPatrol...

I still use the v1.0.29, only for on-demand, to avoid the resources...

Regards

 

The procedure was more of an experiment to try to prevent the automatic launch than anything else. The simplest way to avoid the resource usage is to simply let Counterspy start at boot, disable active protection from the sytem tray icon and then shutdown Counterspy (also from the system tray icon). I have never seen this fail to remove all Sunbelt processes and have never seen them relaunch automatically after doing so.

Scans can still be performed on demand by manually opening Counterspy and shutting down from the system tray icon afterwards will once more remove all processes until they are either launched manually or the system is restarted.

Disabling active protection from the system tray icon is a persistent setting so really only needs to be done once. Yes, this setting is persistent across system restarts.

 

I contacted Sunbelt and asked the following question.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
There was an issue that if one had both MSAS and Counterspy
on the same machine uninstalling either would cause problems.

I currently have both, and would like to uninstall MSAS. I
am not very knowledgeable with computers.

Please advise if uninstalling either program will cause
problems, and if so what do you suggest?

I have not upgraded to the new version due to the issue of
resource use.

Thanks,
Jerry

Here is the reply.

Thank you for contacting technical support. Start with uninstall
Microsoft Antispyware with add remove programs in control panel. Restart
your pc then uninstall CounterSpy. Restart and delete the folder
c:\program files\sunbelt\counterspy.

Use the link below to download and install CounterSpy.

http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/evaluation/410/counterspy.exe

When you click please select the run or open option so that the
installation will begin after downloading is complete.

Richard Beliveau
Consumer Support


Hope this helps some. Presently I am not going to go through the process as I do not want to install the new version at this time.
Jerry

 

Another example of the quality of un-installers

 

In 3 of October, CounterSpy released "this" version by the 2º time, and everything is the same...

Even if I only use it for on-demand, the " sunThreatEngine.exe" and "SunProtectionServer.exe" processes started automatically and using a lot of memory, about 55MB, so until I see that these kind of things will not be changed, I will uninstall this program...

Hope you have luck with it...

 

My Ad-Aware Plus, Ad-Watch hardly uses anything.

 

vampir, i uninstalled the version too, never again with sunbelt, try the MS antispyware, much better

 

Ive had counterspy for a while and like most posters here only use it for on demand these days.I use rampage on this aging 98 system to give me some control over ram.Just opening 1.5 and watching rampage countdown from 55 meg of ram to nothing is quite an eye opener.I also hate any programme that leaves a damn startup /run key even though all options have been disabled in the preferences , although its easy enough to remove it.Mind you spybot isnt much better on resources than counterspy is for memory on my system.These days i just use kaspersky extended bases and the outpost plugin , as im getting fed up with multiple progs doing the same thing.I wouldnt really bother with the outpost plugin , but it seems to have negligible resource/memory effects when running ,and it plays nice with kav so ive left it running.
ellison

 

MS AntiSpyware are ignorating some spyware by default and I don't that...

I use the AntiSpyware feature of Outpost, and I will add SpywareDoctor Free for on-demand backup that also have a very good detection...

 

You can use SpySweeper too.

 

To use SpySweeper, I have to buy it, and for now I can't and don't need...

Another thing is that I never been infected because I have a good use of the Internet and I'm very well protected with my main tools...

Thanks

 

I was wondering whether to install this version after getting fed up with the previous version's updating problem. I don't think I will bother with it. A few of you are saying you have uninstalled, which I have too but have a feeling that the Counterspy Hook is still there. I only know it installed a hook because under the bit which shows if you have any hooks it said there was one for Counterspy! Don't know what one is but doesn't sound good! How do you make sure everything from this program has gone? Thanks.

 

Why don't you just use HijackThis!? That should solve your problem

 

Hijack This is the only way to check?