MS AntiSpyware vs Ad-Aware vs. SpyBot
Found on Slashdot on Friday, 07 January 2005
Flexbeta.net compares Microsoft's new spyware fighting tool, Windows AntiSpyware, to Ad-Aware and SpyBot S&D; the two leading spyware tools on the market today. The review sets up an infected PC using VMWare Workstation and scans the machine using all three tools to see which tool detects the most spyware. Though still in beta, Microsoft AntiSpyware does an amazing job at detecting spyware by finding twice as many infected files as Ad-Aware and nearly three times as SpyBot.
When I read about the Beta release, I was wondering how good it would be. Unfortunately, I'm pretty lazy sometimes so I tried to test it on a virtual machine just a few minutes ago. Yes, tried only. After the installer told me that the software requires IE6, I upgraded the browser (at this point, the MS product was alread a no-no for me). After some reboots I once again tried to install it. This time I was told that it only works on XP, W2k or W2k3. Now the question is: why didn't it say so before I upgraded IE? It would have never worked on W98 anyway, but yet played dumb and asked for an IE update. Good thing I didn't try this on my main system. From the tests I've read, it's pretty good. But it's so dependant on IE6 that it looks like MS is trying to use it to get some users back to IE.