The Friendliest Computer Club in Ventura County Since 1986
SPY BOT, SEARCH AND DESTROY
This is a reprint from the May 2006 issue of TOE (The Outer Edge)
By Jim Thornton
One of the most popular spyware detection and removal freeware programs is Spybot Search & Destroy. Spybot was developed by a German programmer and is available from a U.S. Web site over the Internet by doing a Goggle search for Spybot Search & Destroy. In contrast to Ad-Aware SE Personal, there are no shareware versions of Spybot. A freeware program is one for which the developer and/or company doesn't charge for the program in contrast to shareware programs. However, all freeware programmers do appreciate donations.
On the homepage of the developer's Web site, you will first need to select which of the 51 languages you want to use on the site. After you download the 4,920 KB (K = kilo or one thousand and B = byte, a unit of measure of data) file and during the installation, you will need to make another language selection again so that the proper language is displayed thereafter. However, the program comes in only five languages - English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Be sure to select the immediate downloading of the definition updates and to create a registry backup.
Next, launch Spybot, and the opening screen gives you three choices - Check for problems, Recovery, or Search for Updates. Check for problems means to start the scan; Recovery, to restore certain files that were previously designated as spyware, also known as adware; and Search for Updates, to download the most current definition file containing profiles of programs that have been previously identified as a virus or spyware. The list of definitions needs to be very frequently updated - at least once a month if not weekly - in order to catch the latest ones. First, click on Search for Updates to install the definitions, then Check for Problems to initiate the full system scan. The scans that Spybot does take a lot of time compared to other similar programs, but Spybot does a very thorough job so the wait is worthwhile.
Upon completion of the scan, Spybot displays a list of problems that it found with an open check box next to each one so you can either leave the item on your computer, or, with a single click on the Fix selected problems, all of the checked detected spyware will be trashed.
I found this program does a very good job and has many other features. Some of the more interesting features are the monitoring of the registry so that any attempts to add, change, or remove items are immediately announced; a file "shredder" that securely overwrites unwanted deleted files; an e-mail blocker that prevents unwanted solicitations, etc. Another good feature is that the Spybot program includes a tutorial.
An interesting feature of Spybot is if it finds a program on your computer that has a module that is displaying ads, Spybot will remove and replace that module with an empty dummy so the program continues to work, but ads will be no longer displayed. Spybot will also remove your history of the Web sites last visited, the files that you opened, the programs that you started, etc. Earlier versions of this program caused the Internet Explorer to slowdown and had a stability problem causing the computers to crash, but this has been corrected in the current version of 1.4.
There is an Advanced option, where the user can exclude certain files from being acted upon determined by their file extensions, where the Spybot icons will appear on the computer, create backups of removed problem files, to ignore scanning of selected programs, to ignore cookies, etc. Spybot does work with Windows' Scheduled Tasks so you can have it scan your computer on a regular timetable.
PC World, a popular monthly computer magazine, has recently rated Spybot as one of its top choices.
An interesting measurement of a product is comparing the size of its Help file - Spybot manual is 189 KB, which is the smallest of all programs reviewed. This is totally understandable because of Spybot's built-in tutorial feature.
Another measurement is how many users have downloaded the program from PC World's Web site - the figure for Spybot is 6.0 million - which is about average. Some computer radio program hosts suggest that you should run Spybot followed by another similar antispyware program. My experience is when I run the other program after Spybot, nothing is found.
Spybot runs on Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, and XP operating systems and like most other programs is not compatible with Linux/Unix or Mac systems. The program is fully compatible with the three most common Internet browsers - Internet Explorer, Netscape Communicator, and Opera.
