Which free anti-spyware do you prefer?

Life Technology
21

:bravo: and he ties it all back together!! brilliant!! :bravo:

22

You think THAT was good? You shoulda seen the “I found 5NT” thread. Pure brilliance. Not all thanks to me, obviously. The chief and sandman were genius.

23

I’ve had this wincji32.dll dialer problem, so recently I’ve tried Avast, AVG Anti-spyware, Ad-aware, and Spybot. I couldn’t delete the file manually even after rebooting in safe mode (the dll was still running in safe mode, so I tried ending the process via Task Manager, but it still wouldn’t let me).

Next, downloaded Avast and ran a scan on boot; found two dialers; looked good for a bit, but then it was back.

Next to try: Ewido’s AVG Anti-spyware and ran a scan; found one dialer.

Since then, so far so good. The temp exe dialer files and windows have not popped up since then.
Then also downloaded Adaware, which found a lot of objects including some remaining traces of the dialer. So the previous attempts killed enough of it to prevent it from popping up but it was still in there somewhere.

Then I ran Symantec and it found and could not remove or even quarantine the dialer.
So it’s still in there. But I reran Adaware with the following configuration, which didn’t find it this time:
General Button > Safety & Settings: Checked (Green) all three.
Tweak Button > Cleaning Engine > UNchecked “Always try to unload modules before deletion”.
Selected both “Search for negligible risk entries” as well as “low-risk threats"; Selected “Perform full system scan”.

Next, tried SPYBOT-S&D 1.4. It found a number of problems, none obviously the dialer, and had one resident in memory, so I reran it on boot, then ran Avast, which caught a dialer. It let me delete both.
Now I think the system is clean; reruns of the above come up with zilch.

Conclusions?

  1. You have to run multiple kinds to catch everything.

  2. Avast can scan but its resident protection is incompatible with Norton/Symantec, so if you want to use the latter, don’t bother with Avast.

  3. I found Spybot’s interface to be buggy. Several times I couldn’t read the control buttons.

  4. AVG Anti-spyware has a nice interface. Unlike some other programs, it runs the scan to the end before asking you what to do with each item found. This means you can leave it running while you step away from the PC (even overnight). With some programs that stop and ask you what to do each time they find a problem, the scan won’t be finished if you leave it running. Major tedium, having to stay at the PC during the whole scan.

AVG’s also allows you good control over what to do with each problem found, and includes options like delete vs delete on boot; most free programs aren’t so flexible.

AVG costs US$30/yr (this is the anti-spyware, not the anti-virus), or $40/2 yrs, or $72 for 2 PC’s for 2 years. The full AVG including also anti-virus and firewall runs $70 for 1 PC for 2 yrs.

I’m using it on a 28-day trial; not sure if I’ll buy it but I am considering it.