Webroot Spy Sweeper 5.5 Review |
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Spy Sweeper 5.0 Review
Webroot Spy Sweeper is an effective standalone tool for detecting, removing, and blocking spyware.
In our spyware effectiveness test, Webroot detected 83% of spyware and disabled 79% of it, making this second only to PC Tools Spyware Doctor in terms of sheer effectiveness.
Spy Sweeper can can detect spyware running in memory, stop browser hijackings, examine your startup settings, remove tracking cookies, and eliminate registry changes made by intruding programs. It does a good job eliminating tough-to-remove spyware that often evades detection or removal with lesser products by removing it during the next boot cycle. It can even detect when new spyware tries to install itself while you are surfing.
After removing offending spyware, Spy Sweeper will immunize your computer against certain kinds of "repeat offenders" such as browser hijackings and tracking cookies. We discovered no problems on either Windows XP or Windows 2000.
Usability
Spy Sweeper has the kind of slick interface one expects with modern utilities. You interact with the program primarily through a toolbar on the left that offers you a few simple choices ? but in practice, only one, "Sweep Now", is necessary.
After starting a sweep, Spy Sweeper will perform an in-depth scan of your system. A few minutes later you?ll be shown all spyware that was detected on your system. Webroot isn't the fastest anti-spyware of the bunch, but this isn't because of poor performance. Rather, it's because it scans every file on your hard drive instead of taking hueristic short-cuts that can lead to missed spyware.
One issue that we encountered with the free trial version are frequent pop-up alerts. These alerts appear so frequently that they interfere with the operation of the program. They continue to appear even after they are dismissed and the "Do not show this alert again" option is checked. However, this problem only occurs with the unregistered (free) version. The paid version of the program works flawlessly in this regard.
Frequent alerts make scanning with Webroot a manual process
Removal
When the scan is complete, Spy Sweeper gives you a detailed report of all the spyware on your system. You can easily choose to leave certain programs installed. You might want to do this, for instance, because many free programs (such as Kazaa) will not work without their embedded spyware. If you?re the curious type and like to poke under the covers, Spy Sweeper will give you a brief description directly in the window, along with a "more details" button that will bring up an informative description of the piece of software in question.
We put Spy Sweeper through our brutal Spyware Effectiveness Test. After a 24 minute scan, it detected 83% of the spyware and disabled 79% of it. Spy Sweeper did not flag any legitimate applications as spyware. These results are higher than in our previous test, which is all the more impressive given the number of new additions we've made to our spyware test this month.
Webroot removed most of the common pests we threw against it, but did not remove some controversial programs such as Kazaa or DashMemory (presumably because these can be manually uninstalled from the control panel). It also missed the uber-baddie, CoolWebSearch. However, our machine ran consierably better and faster after using this product, but it wasn't completely free from spyware. We did find that running Spyware Doctor in conjunction with Webroot's Spy Sweeper eliminated 100% of the spyware in our test, so this will probably be a good option for those who don't mind buying two programs.
Quarantine
So what happens if you do remove spyware and find out later that it was necessary to run one of your favorite applications? Spy Sweeper quarantines spyware in a special folder in case you?d like to recover it later.
Other Options
Spy Sweeper offers a number of other options, including the requisite scheduler, the ability to scan certain drives (useful for USB flash drives), and immunization functionality.
The immunization functionality can be customized. You can activate or deactivate shields which will guard against home page hijackings, tracking cookies, and in-memory spyware. In particular, this last option could come in handy on slower computers, which need all the performance you can squeeze out of them.
Customer Support
Webroot provides excellent customer support and a "no questions asked" refund policy. We haven't received any complaints from our readers in the recent past, so we can conclude that they've streamlined their customer service operations.
Summary
Webroot's Spy Sweeper is one of the better products out there, with an good 83% removal rate. However, it failed to remove some of the more obvious threats and can be a bit of a resource hog. Also, the unregistered version bombards the user with continuous pop-up alerts that make the program hard to use (the registered version is fine, however). While we don't consider it the top program available, it would make an excellent addition to PCTools Spyware Doctor (running both together eliminated 100% of the spyware in our test).
Purchase Price: $29.95 (1 year), $39.95 (2 years - 33% savings)
Free Trial: Yes
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Comments (2)
my spysweeper will not delete virusbuster, what do i do to get rid of that virus ?
Posted by ray fowler | November 14, 2006 5:43 PM
I have been using Spysweeper for the past year and am quite frustrated with it. The license is now due for renewal and I am in the process of looking for another anti-spyware product. I have had a number of problems with it. For your info, I am running Windows XP.
1)The license is for one computer rather than a home so it's quite expensive in these days of everybody in the house having a computer - in my case I had to buy 3 licenses.
2)It uses an enormous amount of computer resources, particularly memory. Oddly, none of the reviews seem to address this problem. I finally had to stop it from loading on start-up on my wife's computer and my notebook because it slowed performance so much. So then I had to make a point to go turn it on and run it every few days when not using those computers. So much for automatic scheduling and real-time blocking.
3)The last update I received clobbered Microsoft Outlook. It stopped all emails from being downloaded from my ISP. It took me and the ISP two days to figure out the problem. I don't have much sympathy for a software company that doesn't thoroughly test its products against Microsoft before releasing an update. Just stupid. You may not like Microsoft, but they still represent 80% of the users out there.
4)Turned out Webroot had a fix on their website. So why didn't they correct the update??? Did their fix and email worked OK again. However, after that, Spysweeper no longer found any spyware when I ran the sweep. I would then run Ad-Aware and it would find 15 or 20. So somewhere between the update and the fix, it essentially became disfunctional.
So I finally gave up and removed it from all of my computers since the license was running out in another week.
Posted by P C Arnold Jr | July 29, 2007 2:34 PM