Anyone know any really good Anti-Virus and Spy/Ad-ware software?

[TylerD]

Has anyone used Microsoft's new anti-spyware? It seems pretty good, picked up a few things that Adaware missed. Its only in Beta though.

[Twitch1977]

You should absolutely check out Microsoft's new Antispyware program which is free and currently in beta. (I believe MS intends to keep it free as well.) It is the old Giant Anti-Spyware program repackaged and you can get it from:

http://download.microsoft.com

There is a banner along the top of the page. (You can skip the machine validation).

I ran adaware on a laptop last night and it came back clean, but MS's new program found 7 instances that Adaware missed (both running full (deep) system scans.)

Other good benefits of MS's new product are:
- Can schedule the program to update it's pattern files daily at a certain time.
- Can schedule the program to run an anti-spyware scan at a certain time daily, weekly, etc.
- Offers 'always on' protection similar to an anti-virus program in that you can set it to always run and stop spyware before it gets itself installed. And it actually seems to work OK compared to spybot's similar protection.

All in all I'm not a big MS fan, but for a free program I'd really give this one a shot.

T

[for teh win]

Microsoft would be the right company to make anti-spyware products for Windows. Looking forward to the final version.

Ad Aware and Spybot don't cut it. They mostly remove tracking cookies and then not even all of them. However, they don't find the nastiest stuff on your computer, the trojans etc that many free and popular downloads contain nowadays.

I have tried Pest Patrol which I can promise finds and removes far more than Ad Aware ever did. It can also be remotely administrated via a network. Then again it is not freeware. I won't spam the forum with links to a commercial product, but if you search for the maker's home page there is a free web scan service there. Try run Ad Aware and then do the scan and you might see what I mean.

[ZeeBee]

I've been using Giant AntiSpyware for some time now. Joyously, I bought it 1 week before Microsoft bought the company and decided to give the product away for free.

I used to use Spybot, but Giant/Microsoft is much better - it detects and successfully removes more spyware and is more "professional" in terms of interface and ease-of-use. it gets my thorough recommendation

ZB