MS AntiSpyware vs Ad-Aware vs. SpyBot

An anonymous reader writes "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."

Comments

Just tried to install this MS AntiSpyware

[benzapp]

and apparently their detection of license keys has greatly improved... my key is invalid.

Anyone else have this problem using their obscure key of choice? SP2 installed fine a few months ago.

Microsoft AntiSpyware forces you to install IE 6

[Brett Glass]

I just attempted to install Microsoft AntiSpyware on a machine from which Internet Exploder had been mostly removed via the utility Win98 Lite. It refused to install, insisting upon the presence of Internet Exploder 6. The machine in question uses Mozilla, with which we're quite happy. It appears that Microsoft is tying yet another product to the use of Internet Exploder 6, probably in violation of the recent DoJ Consent Decree. Will the Bush Justice Department do anything?

Warning: Real-Time option reenables itself

[PatientZero]

I tested it out too on my home machine, and the only thing it found was the Download Manager for Gamespot (based on Kontiki). Thank you Mozilla. :)

In any case, I uncheked the "install real time protection agents" option during installation, but after running the scan I ran through the options to see what other features it had. Surprise, RTP was enabled. Oh the irony of MS AntiSpyware behaving in the same shady fashion as Spyware apps. ;)

So if you do install it but don't want the RTP agents, make sure you hit up the options before quitting.

Re: keep the politics out, please....

[fm6]

... but when you go on the political rant by saying "you'll always be sorry the Democrats didn't stay in power long enough to break Microsoft up" - you lose me.

I think you need to have more than a passing reference to a particular political party before it counts as a "political rant". And it's not as if I'm a big fan of the Demos anyway. But that's a secondary issue. Let me refresh your memory: back in 2000, MS was defending itself in antitrust court, and doing a really poor job of it. At one point they actually got caught fabricating evidence. Then the Demos left office, and a new pro-business AG simply dropped the case.

Whether you think the anti-trust case was a good idea or a bad one, you have to concede that Microsoft might well have been broken up by now if Al Gore had won the election. Pointing out that fact doesn't make me a partisan.

Why can't people get it through their heads that Microsoft's problems are part of the natural course of free-market economics? They didn't start out a huge business, placing their OS on everyone's computer. They *earned* that position through superior marketing and business deals.

Again, your memory needs refreshing. MS's dominance of the OS market is pretty much an accident. That actually got into the business against their own will. They wanted to sell development tools for the new IBM PC, but that meant that IBM had to adopt an OS those tools would run on. Which is why they steered IBM to CP/M. When that fell through, they hurriedly licensed a CP/M clone from Seattle Computer Products, which became the basis for MS-DOS.

MS-DOS is one of the biggest abortions since the rise of modern technologies (find me a single OS expert who will give it high marks). Yet its very flaws created such a high level of lockin with the PC platform itself -- which was also pretty flawed. Since compatibility soon became the name of the game, clone computers had to reproduce all of IBMs mistakes. And since their biggest mistake was choosing MS-DOS, computer makers ended up paying a tithe to Bill for every box they sold.

But even if you were correct, and Bill achieved his success by technical brilliance and plain good business -- so what? He got his reward when he became the richest dude on the planet. He did not earn the right to destroy the very marketplace that made him rich. Microsoft's role in the current marketplace is bad for all of us -- including Microsoft. Calling me ideological names isn't going to change that.

VNC is evil!!!!111

[Venner]

Some of what it detects are definitely false positives. On my machine, it claimed to find registry traces of eDonkey and Grokster, which it says contain adware. But the keys it found were put there by Shareaza, a non-spyware open-source client.

Yep. Same here. It decided that VNC was obviously an attempt to remotely hijack my computer.

It also felt the need to alter my hosts file for me. It didn't like the fact that I had "ads.msn.com" pointing to 127.0.0.1 (as well as over 100 other ad domains; the only one it cared about was MSN!)