Spy Sweeper vs Spyware Doctor

Last weekend, if you remember, I spent a large majority of my time chasing down a phantom trojan that my CounterSpy anti-spyware software said was infecting all of our computers. It turned out to be a false positive detection and we really had no nasty trojans on any of our computers. While I was ready to forgive CounterSpy and move on with life, something else happened that made me think about changing to a different anti-spyware product.

During my ordeal, I remembered reading about two other spyware hunters that are now getting better reviews than CounterSpy...namely Spy Sweeper from Webroot Software and Spyware Doctor from PC Tools. So I decided to download both of them (trial versions) to see if they could find the phantom trojan. Of course, neither one found it, since it didn't exist. But something else happened that caught my immediate attention: Both products found more spyware that CounterSpy had missed, some of it listed as very dangerous.

Whoa, dude! Time to rethink my options. So I made a few notes while testing each of our computers as to the effectiveness of these two programs. The results on all four computers turned out the same, at least in the amount of additional spyware detected. Spyware Doctor caught far more than Spy Sweeper. Rather than give you the results on all four computers, I will just limit my report to my laptop.

Now, I have had my laptop about 3 1/2 years now, and it has been on the Internet many, many times as you can imagine. For nearly two years, I have been using CounterSpy, keeping it up-to-date and running scans quite often. Imagine my surprise when I installed Spy Sweeper and it caught 54 additional pieces of spyware. All of them were cookies and none of them were very dangerous...but still, any spyware is a bad thing.

I did not clean up those 54 items, but rather left them for Spyware Doctor to detect. I deactived both Spy Sweeper and CounterSpy so Spyware Doctor could have a clean run at my laptop. Well, guess what...Spyware Doctor reported 324 pieces of spyware, most cookies but a few of them were listed as highly dangerous. That's a big difference! And as I said above, all four computers had similar results, only the number of spyware detections differed, but there was always a big discrepancy between the number of bad guys detected.

I faced a couple of decisons...should I bag CounterSpy with over 200 days left in my subscription or should I go ahead and buy Spyware Doctor, or even Spy Sweeper as it is cheaper? Spyware Doctor sells for $29.95 and Spy Sweeper is "on sale" for $19.95. Here was something else I didn't mention...Spy Sweeper came fully active for a 15 day trial period, while Spyware Doctor would only detect...not do any cleanup unless I purchased it. My-oh-my, what should I do? Could I live without Spyware Doctor knowing that my computers had all that extra spyware on it?

I am going to keep you in suspense for a couple of paragraphs while I give you a couple of snippets from the recent PC World Review on spyware that I used in to my own final decision.

"In detecting actively running adware and spyware samples, Spy Sweeper and Spyware Doctor tied for first place, catching 90 percent of our test set. CounterSpy and Spybot brought up the rear, nailing 80 percent..."

"Three of the five apps--CounterSpy, Spy Sweeper, and Spyware Doctor--profess to fight an increasingly important category of malware known as rootkits. Spyware Doctor detected all nine of our actively running rootkits, and Spy Sweeper detected four. CounterSpy managed to nab only two. The free tools caught none. All five programs--regardless of their rootkit capabilities--found one or two inactive rootkits. According to AV-Test.org, the apps' standard code-based scanning can detect inactive rootkits, but they need special routines to find the active ones..."

"Disinfecting the spyware proved difficult: To elude security software, spyware writers continually change the way their malware behaves. In our spyware disinfection tests, Spy Sweeper and Spyware Doctor ranked first, disinfecting 65 percent of the files"...

So what did I do? I have been unhappy with CounterSpy for a few weeks now, especially when I found out that active protection mode took up over 220,000 megabytes of memory (see my blog of 1/15/07). Still, my initial decision was to think about it a little bit longer...and while I was doing so, continue running Spy Sweeper for the remainder of the trial period. But, as I started to de-install Spyware Doctor, my Internet browser popped on and I was offered Spyware Doctor for six months for $9.95. That makes it the same price as Spy Sweeper...and my tests show Spyware Doctor to be the better products.

That did it! I spent the $9.95 and activated Spyware Doctor on all four of our computers. I cleaned off all the bad guys and everything is running smoothly. It may not be quite as user-friendly as Spy Sweeper, but once I started digging into it, I discovered a whole host of amazing things that it does. I am very happy I made the decision.

I suggest you might want to download both products from their respective websites and give each a try on your computer(s). I am curious to know what your results are. By the way, you don't have to uninstall Spyware Doctor to get the special price...just go to their special web page and you can get it.