Pest Patrol or MS Windows Defender?

If you only had to depend on one to protect your system (from spyware), which would you choose and why?

Pest Patrol 5 or MS Windows Defender Beta 2

 

MS Defender Beta 2 because Pest Patrol has too many false positives. Secondly microsoft antispyware has good detection rates (i havent tried windows defender tho)

 

I must agree .

 

PestPatrol (PP) finds things other products don't.

PestPatrol has found and removed much more on my system than has MSAS (MSWD).

It is my belief that the false positives claims for PP are overstated. Yes, there have been a few...

Overall, I'm not saying that you should choose PP over MSWD -- as I don't know enough to make that assertion.

But I'd choose PestPatrol based on my own experiences.

And PP updates all the time now.... it seems like multiple times a day on some days. In terms of updates, the MS product is not even close (but that may be changing of course..).

 

I agree that PP finds things others Defender may not . However , they are few and far between IF they are legitimate . FP s are not overstated in my opinion . They continue to have this problem . It has been a proble since it first came out and has not changed . If you know what you are doing , it is ok to use but , many trust these apps . If that is the case , PP should be avoided .

 

Hello,

PestPatrol is a FP king, but it did not kill my test machine.
Windows Defender killed my test machine.

PestPatrol detects all kinda stuff (lots of FP).
Windows Defender detects nothing (like the dudes in Big Lebowski - we are nihilists, Lebowski, we believe in nozing, nozing!).

So, it's PestPatrol.

Mrk

 

I won't play fair. Neither of the 2. I choose Trend Micro Anti-Spyware.

 

I will cheat too and won't play fair either but Trend Micro's Anti Spyware also produces some False Positives thats why I use Spyware Doctor. Though around here, they say Spysweeper is #1 followed by Spyware Doctor so who knows, but I don't use Spysweeper, don't like it.

dja2k

 

Me too, have not played these two either. I just use Ad-Aware SE and Spybot S&D and SpywareGuard and WinPatrol to protect me from spywares.

In the past I uses Microsoft Anti-Spyware Beta but I have removed it and rid it coz its heavy on my system and eats up my RAM memory.

As your question which is better...I think my answer would be which of them don't hog my system to a crawl.

 

guess ill join too. one of my favs is spy sweeper for paid, and ad-aware and spybot for free scanners.

 

@dja2k I have had NO fp's with Trend Micro Anti-Spyware.

 

Spy Sweeper or spyware doctor

 

There is just this week concluded a very recent comparison of these 2 plus some others you are familiar with around these discussion blocks.

Pest Patrol doesn't appear to have faired very well at all in those results.

Here

 

Hi

In the time ( just over a year ) I had Spyware Doctor on my PC it did NOT produce a single legitimate detection. My patience with Spyware Doctor ran out when it " flagged " part of my AOL Program as malware. Pest Patrol produces many F/Ps as well.

I'll stick to Spy Sweeper & Counter Spy.

HR

 

I have old trial version of SD and I did feel, it brings out a lot of enteries as compared to others, I wonder it may be false +ves or just traces labelled as real threats which others label as just traces and don,t give details.

As far as real time protection is concerned I never saw anyone catching some thing in realtime except legitimate installations etc.

 

I don't see how the tests done in the link you provided can really be that valuable. While they do have some merit, I can't see where tests of that sort can really be of a great value considering the OP didn't tell us which Anti-malware programs detected which forms of malware and more importantly IMO is the fact that he was basically only scanning installers for the various malware and not scanning an infected system with actual running malware. The results would be far different if he did tests of an infected pc with actual running malware, I can guarantee you of that.

Any tests done to detect malware should be done against active malware, not just the installers and should include which programs blocked or prevented infection of the malware to begin with. That is if you want to get a better picture of which Anti-malware programs are really the most effective against these threats. That's my opinion anyway.

 

Pestpatrol. It finds more stuff. Legit stuff not false positives. I believe the false positives are overstated to. Have seen people posting about spy sweeper, spyware doctor and counterspy having the same false positives as pest patrol but not labeled as bad as pest petrol. Even seen people say trend micro anti-spyware has allot of false positives and they would not use it but still don't get the same bad rep as pestpatrol. Makes me wonder about this thread https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=122699. Microsoft is screwing up giant ant-spyware. Windows defender is a joke. I knew when they bought giant though that they would most likely change and screw up giant's good anti-spyware product. Ms dumbed it down just like ca dumbed down pestpatrol. I had the same suspicions when ca bought pestpatrol. It does find more from experience and I don't mean false positives. Biggest thing ms has going for it is that their product is free and people can say its a free version of giant's program. But like I said ms is ruining it. They changing it to much. No telling what it is gonna be like when ms gets done with it.

 

In our lab tests Pest patrol always scores badly in detection rates, and high in false positives. So badly, in fact that we stopped testing it. Windows Defender scores much better, but still far behind Spysweeper and Spyware doctor. Trend is also generally unimpressive. We basically worry about Spysweeper, spyware doctor, counterspy, and windows defender roughly in that order. We usually perform extensive testing against over 1K trusted apps and several hundred spyware apps per matrix.

"I had Spyware Doctor on my PC it did NOT produce a single legitimate detection. My patience with Spyware Doctor ran out when it " flagged " part of my AOL Program as malware. Pest Patrol produces many F/Ps as well." - one note in defense of our competitor.. AOL did recently release some adware as part of their install. Shouldn't have been tagged as malware though.

Of course I am biased but I would recommend that you try Zerospyware. Detection and removal that is directly competitive with spysweeper and spyware doctor, as well as several features not included in the other applications (automated discovery of unknown applications using broad trusted list) vulnerability scan and patching, startup registry management.

 

Hi,

Just to be a little more specific .... the AOL detection with Spyware Doctor was about 4 or 5 months ago and it had flagged a detection of a dialer within AOL.
It was not an adware detection.

At one point before I uninstalled it .... Spyware Doctor was showing 116 detections. They were all F/P's .... Process Guard even flagged UnHackMe as malware.

When trying Trend Micro's program .... soon after they purchased it, F/P's were an issue as well. There were quite a few. I had made a change to my start up menu (msconfig) and not rebooted before running the Trend Micro scan .... It flagged msconfig as malware. That was some time ago, so it could have improved by now.

On a seperate note I'm presently trying (15 day trial) ZeroSpyware .... so far I like it .... I've got 13 days left.

HR