Pest PAtrol questions

OK a friend of mine is thinking of buying Pest Patrol. I don't know anything about it. I never tried it or used it. I do see it have a lot of false positives. Is Pest Patrol any good? I was told it was an AT but on the PP website it's called an AntiSpyware program. Which is it? Is it both? I read the test Eirc Howes did on the AS programs. I see PP faired pretty good but some FP's. All info and people that use PP please reply.

(Being that PP can be an AT also please feel free to move this thread over to the AT part of the board.)

 

Hi Notageek,

You said your friend is thinking of buying it.
I don't know which security apps he/she has.
But in case he/she does not have an AT, please advice to buy an AT in the first place (assuming he/she has already an AV).
My strictly personal advice : BOClean AND TDS-3.

PestPatrol....hhhmmm....
Again my strictly personal opinion: far and far too much false positives; in one word: not reliable.

 

Hi FanJ

My friend is running with TH as and AT and I think he's using AVast Pro. I thought PP had a lot of FPS but I wasn't sure how good the program was. Thanks for the response.

 

Pestpatrol is for everything else but viruses. Worms,trojans,dialers,spy/adware etc.. Here is a list http://research.pestpatrol.com/WhitePapers/Glossary.asp For more info look here http://research.pestpatrol.com/ . It does a good job despite the false postives. If you look around most the paid programs that are suppose to detect far more than the free ones get trashed about false positives and most dont get recommend for first time users. Spy sweeper and now even the new one gaint antispyware and spyware doctor etc..
I think it is bound to happen with products like them that are made to detect a wide range of stuff and dont have a huge team to double check the stuff. Like I have siad before at least pestpatrol tells you it will have fp on thier site and lets you submit your logs and get support. Some of them other products dont even tell you about fp or even provide help with fp.

 

Good points about PP dread. But I would think most newbies would not know about getting help on their website.

Another way you could double check any findings would be to post them here and ask if anyone else has the same detections.

Again another alternate plan would be to submit it to Kaspersky's online scanner for another opinion.

Seems like a lot of work though and my guess is many newbies, just about eveyone really, wouldn't want to go through the trouble of sending or posting what it finds first, and then waiting for a reply. They just want a scanner that works right the first time, no wating and no double or triple checking.

So that's why I don't recommend PP for newbies. More advanced users are better able to handle it and I only use PP myself to cross check with other scanners and never delete what it finds until I have checked into it throughly first.

 

Install the free Yahoo toolbar with free Antispy for IE.

http://toolbar.yahoo.com/

It comes with a (limited?) version of Pest Patrol.

You can disable the Yahoo toolbar in IE and still use the Antispy part (without having to even start IE).

Best of all, it's all free.

If you want to pay for an anti-trojan my personal recommendation would be TDS-3, although I've never caught a single trojan with it, only two false positives

Also, Ewido Security Center is also free and coming up as well regarded:

http://www.ewido.net/en/

regards,
halcyon

 

Unless your friend is prepared to spend time cross-checking everything that PestPatrol throws up, he is likely to do more harm than good to his computer. I recently downloaded the Eraser programme and PP is telling me this is adaware. In the eight months that I've had PP, it has never thrown up anything other than false positives.

In addition to ewido, he might consider A2 which is also free http://www.emsisoft.com/en/software/free/

Other useful free programmes are BHO Demon http://www.snapfiles.com/get/bhodaemon.html and Startup Guard 1.0 http://www.acelogix.com/freeware.html

I also like to know the number of processes running on my computer at any one time without having to open up Task Manager. Most malware will add a process or processes. I use CoolMon version 1.0 and have it configured to show the number of running processes in the bottom right hand corner of the screen (always on top, with a translucent background so it doesn't interfere with anything). It isn't free, but it isn't expensive http://www.coolmon.org/home/screenshots.php

 

Sorry, in my post I should have referred to adware, not adaware.

 

Thanks for all the replies. I'm going try to talk my friend into using AdAware and Spybot instead of PP. I don't really want to be the one stuck with helping every other day on FP's.

 

The problem with this theory is that Pest Patrol has WAY more FP than any other product, commercial or not. It's kind of amusing really to watch Pest Patrol change it's mind each week about which Adware I *really* have, after each update.

Other products have FPs, 1 or 2 maybe, Pest Patrol gives you half a dozen to a dozen typically.