Spysweeper or Spyware Doctor

Hey guys,
I currently have Spysweeper as a licensed program,but it expires in 30 days. I tried Spyware Doctor and it found 106 things that Spysweeper didn't. Has anyone gone from Spysweeper to Spyware Doctor? and how do you like it compared to Spysweeper.Thanks

 

I do wonder however since I used a trial version and it tells me these things are present then informs me that I need to buy it to remove them.

 

I have decided to stick with Spysweeper. It has more features . Anyway,to keep from making another thread, I use Spysweeper and I have spywareblaster,spywareguard,ms defender,spybot installed on my pc.I have Spysweeper and spywareguard running and use spybot,spywareblaster,and ms defender for on demand. Should I stop spywareguard? do I really need all these programs??Thanks

 

Personally I would keep Spysweeper and SpywareBlaster and ditch the rest you have listed.

 

Hi,

I've used both .... and in my opinion Spy Sweeper is a more reliable program. Spyware Doctor produced way too many false positives on my PC.

HR

 

All software security products have their pros and cons, and since none are perfect, opinions will vary. After all, one man's junk is another one's treasure. One advantage that SpySweeper does have over Spyware Doctor is a dedicated user forum. This makes it much easier to report the FPs that Hard Rocker is talking about. I find Spyware Doctor to be a very effective and improving product, but the lack of a forum presense is a little disheartening. Both products are rated high by various software reviewers and through independent testing, so go with the one you like the best....either will do a good job of helping to protect your PC.

 

Used Spy Sweeper since it was first released. Had problems with early 3.xx version's but from 3.5 onwards it's been excellent. Not surprising i've found virtually no threats in the last 12 months(I use Online Armor and BOClean). It's reassuring that i don't have to contend with FP's every other week! Tried Spyware Doctor about 6 months ago and it produced 11 FP's, of which some of them were Cyberlink application's. E-mailed the author and uninstalled it. Won't give the time of day to something that targets obvious good apps as spyware. On a side note: I trialled Zerospyware and my first scan came up clean. So there's a company showing you that you don't need to produce FP's to snare a customer.

muf

 

Yeah. I was having a hard time believing Spyware Doctor found 106 things that Spysweeper didn't.

 

I've been pretty satisfied with Spy Sweeper.
Until now it only produced two times a false positive, which I immediately
reported to their support.
It was fixed pretty fast once it was confirmed and that's been about six months ago.

I also had Spyware Doctor installed in the past and although it's a nice app, it produced
too many false positives on my system in those days.
Two days ago I downloaded it again and ran a scan with updated signatures.
It found 64 objects (all false positives), so IMO Spy Sweeper is the best.

Spyware Doctor is a good anti-spyware, but most people who know almost nothing about
computers will simply quarantine and eventually delete what it found.

I know it happens, but it must be reduced to a minimum to prevent users from deleting keys
necessary for the good functioning of certain programs and/or their PC.

 

I keep Spysweeper and spywareblaster running at all times and use the others I mentioned as an on demand. In the last 6 months,everytime I scan with Spysweeper,nothing was found. The others(spybot,adaware,etc)found a couple of cookies.

 

I would take Spysweeper over SpywareDoctor because of the false positive issues with SD. Not to mention the fact that SD refuses to detect the Sony rootkit and that alone is enough for me to avoid this software. It makes me wonder what other malware they refuse to detect.

 

Wasn't aware of that. So,using the setup I mentioned should be fine then? Don't want to use more than is necessary?

 

I suppose it depends what you do and where you go online. If you avoid pr0n and other questionable sites, are careful what you download and install and don't open unexpected emails or read them as plain text only, you would be better off and may not even need SS, but it's still nice to have a few scanners for on-demand scans. It certainly can't hurt to use SS and SB, though I tend to run a bit more heavily armored ship myself.

 

no,the pc isn't used for questionable sites. Can you elaborate on what you use. Awhile back I was told that running more antispyware programs at once,does more harm than good?

 

Hi,

I actually did the opposite of what you guys did. I uninstalled my SpySweeper for Spyware Doctor coz SpySweeper slows down my comp a little compare to Spyware Doctor. I am sad to know that Spyware Doctor produces lots of FP but weirdly, my Spyware Doctor didnt pick up anything at all since I installed it a month ago. I am currently using Spyware Doctor with Ewido (this program is slowing down my pc too) and NOD32. Guess I am a safe surfer coz NOD32 picks up the nasties while the other 2 just sit on my com and do nothing. . Thanks.

Regards,
LIW

 

I prefer spysweeper to spyware doctor. I find spyware doctor is too high in cpu usage, and a bit more hassle than its worth for what it detects. I'm obviously biased but I also think its worth trying Zerosypware for a 15 day trial. Its usually rated top 3 with Spysweeper and Spyware doctor, but provides several features that the others don't and is much more informative and less taxing on the cpu.

 

Webroot Spy Sweeper for me. I tested them a while back and Spy Sweeper caught something Spyware Doctor missed. The choice was easy.

 

I may be the blacksheep here but I use/have been using Spyware Doctor and have had only 1 false positive. The latest version is way about the old versions. More features with Spysweeper? Can you tell me the extra features you are talking about? I have used Spysweeper in the past including version 4 but not 4.5 and have seen nothing that impress' me more that Spyware Doctor. Just my opinion and it seems to differ with the rest of the group but just letting you know.

Thanks,

Chris

 

LOL....you're not the lone blacksheep, Chris....because I posted above that I use, like, and find Spyware Doctor to be effective as well. I haven't experienced very many FPs with the product either over the past year (maybe two - both involving manual scans of the HOSTS file).....my real complaint is the lack of a forum and user community presense. Reporting things like FPs to "customer service" by creating and submitting a ticket, and then waiting for a reply and/or fix to be issued is a bit painful....and that's why I like to see a forum presense (something SpySweeper DOES offer).

But just to show that opinions will vary.....check out CNET/Download.com's reviews for Spyware Doctor and SpySweeper. I'm not saying that I agree with their complete rankings, but I do find their reasoning interesting, especially comparing FPs for Spyware Doctor and SpySweeper. While they rank the two products identical in their overall evaluation and review scoring, I find it particular interesting what "the bad" is when naming the pros and cons of SpySweeper. Notice below, under "the bad"....what they have to say about SpySweeper and FPs:

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/8483/cnetspywarereview6bk.png

And here's the link to CNET/Download.com's complete review for their top ten spyware removers:

http://www.download.com/Ten-Spyware-Killers//1200-2023_4-5157375.html?tag=hed

 

Hi all,

I've noticed a lot of opinions posted based on personal experiences and reviews. Thought I'd throw my 2 cents in from an industry insider perspective. Let me know what you think. Pardon the long post ahead:

Its hard to compare any two anti-spyware products purely on the basis of false positives and detection and removal capability, either from reviews or from anecdotal testing. Nearly all of the products in this space have false positives. We test our product as well as the competitors mentioned here weekly looking for detection and removal rates and false positives. It varies so much from week to week that its hard to make conclusive determiniations about whether one of these products (or ours) is consistently better at finding spyware, or has less false positives. This is simply a result of the timing and content of the updates vs the test set tested against. Reviewer generally throw a test set of 20-30 spyware at a matrix of products and see which one comes out on top. If you tried the same review with a different set of spyware you would get a different set of results, every time. the only differentiation you would be able to spot is clusters of apps that perform within the same relative rangers. Spysweeper, Spyware Doctor and Zerospyware generally score in the top cluster (order varies from test to test and week to week) Counter Spy and Microsoft Defender in the next tier. SpyBot and Adaware, CA, Trend, Mcaffee, Norton toward the lower end, and the other 200 plus antispyware apps toward the bottom. If this is what happens during controlled testing, then it is even less scientific to select one application over another based on short term experience of a false positive, or better detection.

To really differentiate you have to dig deeper. For instance removal capability on chronic spyware, or evasive spyware, ie.. Varients of CWS shredder, ABetterInternet, Haxdoor, Smithfraud, SpyAxe,SpyFalcon, etc.. Is a serious differentiator. Very few applications out there can remove them at all. Why? because some of these varients, change their name, file size, signature value. some employ rootkits, some use or attach to system processes, some use keep alive processes. This is where the better apps really shine, and most of the rest don't bother.

For an anti-spyware company detection of applications and false positives is reflection of the efficiency, focus, manpower, infrastructure and resources you have to throw at the task. Generally the process is relatively straightforward. At our company development efforts to combat new varients with constantly changing evasive tactics is the more difficult target. In terms of focus.. its still pretty difficult for any anti-spyware company to have complete coverage.. The scale of updates required is too broad. So the decision on which updates to focus on is a difficult one. We have chosen our primary focus to be the spyware that affects our user base. I can't speak for how the others make their decision on where to focus. We do this by receiving reports of process and detection activity from any of our users who opt in to have the application send this to us. From here we analyze this data to look for possible mutations, new spyware, and create trending reports. We then prioritize the inclusion of spyware in proportion to the number of users affected. In addition we perform some random harvesting, and search for spyware drawn from monitoring security forums and a variety of other sources.

The problem we have encountered here is that in several reviews for our product, reviewers chose spyware test sets that included spyware that were not popular or common. Often these may include spyware that we have in our database, but with varients that we have not yet updated.

My point is this aside from gross generalizations of clusters of products, specific detection and removal rates as well as false positives are not particularly useful indicators of which product is better than another.

Features, performance, support, and removal of chronic evasive spyware are far better differentiators. I'm not sure about the current version of Spyware doctor, but in our last tests only Spysweeper and Zerospyware included Pre-OS boot spyware removal capability, which is absolutely necessary in removing some of the system process attached evasive spyware. One of my own issues with Spyware Doctor (which I was recently running on my system) was that the performance impact was too great when it scanned, interfering with my work on my laptop. I haven't run Spysweepr for a long time so this assesment is not conclusive or comparitive, but illustrative. One of the features that I can't do without from our own product is the real time automated discovery feature which highlights unknown processes or dll's running on my system. Right now out of 104 processes and dll's running on my system 9 are identified as unknown. From the file info automatically retreived by the software I know that these are all ok. But every time my system is acting weird I rush to this panel.

So I'm wondering what key features or capabilities power users on this forum really love about one application over another (aside from detection and false positives). Looks like the key issues so far are cpu performance and forum support.

-D

 

Spyware Doctor does have pre system boot removal. So it can remove the infections if the need ever arrises.

This should not be a problem as of late. This was a factor some months ago but resource usage and/or system slowdown is much better now.

I would say for products like this it should be detection, low false positives, removal, and good support.

I do want to thank you zerospyware for posting. As well as letting us know your opinion. I think it's great that you get involved and ask for users opinions.

Thanks,

Chris

 

Hello,
My experience:
Both Spyware Doctor and Spy Sweeper run a bit heavy.
In my tests, Spyware Doctor only found false positives; Spy Sweeper found genuine malware. So I'd say go for Spy Sweeper.
Mrk

 

I was unaware that SpySweeper has a user forum. Can you point me to it please? I have been unable to find it.

 

Have a look at CastleCops Spysweeper.

 

Excellent! Thanks!