which spyware remover for vista 64?

J

jsx1115

Weaksauce
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Oct 23, 2007
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i use avg free for anti-virus, and also have spywareblaster but which spyware removal tool do u recommend for vista 64?
 
IMHO, ALL of the commercial packages have gone down-hill this year, including my previous favorite Spyware Doctor. At version 4, it was sweet. At version 5, it seems bloated, slow and buggy. It's also harder on resources than 4 was.

One of the most effective I've found in a long time is SuperAntiSpyware. It removes more spyware successfully than any other I've used in quite a while.

There is a free version, which is all I use, and a paid version.

I don't need it often. NOD32 3.0 seems to work pretty well on it's own. It's antivirus, and not a dedicated spyware app, but it seems effective enough.

I just have SAS installed in dumb mode, and manually run a scan every month or so with it.
 
NOD32 v3.0 is fantastic, but Eset Smart Security just improves it by offering the addtional spyware/malware protection and a very respectable firewall too.

Windows Defender works fine for a free product; if Microsoft updated it more often it would probably be more useful.

I keep seeing SuperAntiSpyware a lot lately so, guess it's time to fire up a test VM and see what it can do.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
NOD32 v3.0 is fantastic, but Eset Smart Security just improves it by offering the addtional spyware/malware protection and a very respectable firewall too.

Windows Defender works fine for a free product; if Microsoft updated it more often it would probably be more useful.

I keep seeing SuperAntiSpyware a lot lately so, guess it's time to fire up a test VM and see what it can do.
Click to expand...

Microsoft releases updates for Windows Defender at least once a week and often twice a week.
 
That's all fine and dandy, but it can't match Eset's hourly updates, especially when they actually do have updates. I've had 11 in a single day sometimes. Those guys at Eset are on the ball like nobody else from what I can see. :)
 
Windows Defender is actually one of the best spyware packages out there (or was, have not totally kept up with it).

Microsoft bought Giant Antispyware to turn into Windows Defender and Giant was one of if not the best Spyware program out there. I used it before MS took over and after MS took over and it was always a great application that seemed to catch more stuff than even Spyware Doctor plus is very good at preventative stuff that keeps it from ever getting onto your PC.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
I keep seeing SuperAntiSpyware a lot lately so, guess it's time to fire up a test VM and see what it can do.
Click to expand...

I'll be curious to see what you think of it.... it has worked extremely well for me recently. In fact just last Friday I used it on a friends machine and it worked flawlessly... removed 1124 pieces of malicious crap without causing one single problem....
 
is there anything i should be sure to configure in superantispyware's preferences?
 
The defaults will work just fine.

Another one to keep handy is SmitFraudFix.EXE. It is specifically targeted at the zLob/Spysherriff type of infections, which are becomming a true pain in the ass these days.

SpySherrif.
WinAntiVirusPro.
DriveCleaner.
ucleaner.

They are all the same Rogue Anti--Spyware nasties that try to bilk people out of their money.

These things can be impossible to remove if you don't have SmitFraudFix, and luckily it has been 100% effective for me.

BTW... The favorite transport for these bastaads these days is infected Codec's.
 
digital_exhaust said:
I'll be curious to see what you think of it.... it has worked extremely well for me recently. In fact just last Friday I used it on a friends machine and it worked flawlessly... removed 1124 pieces of malicious crap without causing one single problem....
Click to expand...

Well, here's the setup:

I have a Pentium D 925 box, 1GB, XP x64, fully updated, NOD32 v2.7 updated, IE7 with the IE7Pro add-on, CCleaner (latest), and nothing else - I have no other software installed that is related to antispyware/malware protection, not even Windows Defender presently. I've been running this for a while now, and I regularly run CCleaner to clean out the crap (amazing how that works out) and then clean out the Registry. I'll run it as many times in a row as it takes till it tells me there are no more things to "fix" in the Registry; that's usually 2 times in a row, sometimes 3 before it's "clean."

So, I installed and ran SuperAntiSpyware. It took 26 minutes to do a full scan (showed 36K+ files after the scan - I have two drives with several partitions total), and... the results are... <drumroll please>

Absolutely nothing. Seriously.

It found absolutely nothing on my machine, with the configuration above, and nothing else. All I "run" for antispyware/malware is NOD32 v2.7 (just AV software, really), and IE7Pro, and that's it aside from CCleaner.

So, I don't know what's so damned "Super" about SuperAntiSpyware but it didn't find jack shit in the time I had it installed.

Comparison? I ran SuperAntiSpyware a second time, and while it was scanning the drive again I hit HouseCall at http://housecall.trendmicro.com and did a full pass which finished before SuperAntiSpyware did.

Results?

HouseCall found 4 tracking cookies (and I have IE7Pro set to accept session cookies and ignore all 3rd party ones, all of them), but nothing else.

The second scan of SuperAntiSpyware still came up zero. Zilch. Nip. Nothing. Nada. Between null and void.

So... my opinion? It's a piece of useless software. YMMV, of course, and it probably does. But with my fairly basic setup, just a browser and NOD32, then CCleaner 2-3 times a week as I feel is required, I'm about as clean as a machine can be, and I'm online 15+ hours a day with the browser always open and typically 12 tabs or more in action. And when I say I'm online, I mean all over the place <hint, hint>.

Go figure... :p
 
I'm....um, shocked... I guess.

I have had nothing but success with it, and I have used it hundreds of times, on dozens of machines and it has worked very well very consistently.... I'm honestly amazed at the results you got..... as I posted earlier, I have repeatedly had it find and clean thousands of unwanted bits of nastiness.....

That is really odd..... I guess that's all I can say about that.....I guess there is a little more to the whole YMMV thing than I thought....

Now, that being said, I usually use Windows Defender and Housecall in addition to SuperAntiSpyware... (I hate that fucking name, I hate saying it, I hate typing it...probably the only piece of software that I may stop recommending solely based on it's name) and I have found that it is fairly common for one or the other to find things the others have missed, but typically, if it's run first, the others usually find nothing. That can be said for Housecall as well... but I'm just really surprised it's performance was so poor in your tests...Weird;)
 
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