A Quick View Of Microsoft Antispyware (Beta 1.0.509)

 
Feb 10, 2005

by Ryan Hartwich

February 18, 2005

I'll admit, I'm partial to Spybot-S&D (http://www.safer-networking.org). I've used it for a while now and have been quite happy with it. I run with all the 'beta' features and when I'm not 100% sure I have purged my system I load up the slightly annoying Ad-Aware (http://www.lavasoftusa.com). Between the two I feel covered. Most of the reviews I have read have placed the two near or at the top of their anti-spyware rankings... Best of all, they are free.

I first heard about Microsoft's Antispyware beta (http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx) a month or two ago when it came out. While a friend claimed great things, I was frankly... scared. Come-on! Who the heck would trust a version 1.0 product from Microsoft, particularly on beta 1 of a product they bought out less than two months before from a small company that had only released the product as a beta? Even worse, this is a product that revolves around deleting files and killing registry keys. Asking for trouble if you ask me. I chose to wait.

On February 17th Microsoft released a slightly updated version, still in beta, but with fixes and enhancements learned from jacking with countless suckers around the world who were less wary. I finally broke and downloaded it, at work, onto a second PC (without telling my boss, hoping for the best).

The first thing I did was clear all my browser cookies (IE and Firefox). Installing the beta was a simple process, a bit slow but not bad. The download size is less than seven MB. The definitions were current with the download and I purposefully waited on checking for updates.

I simultaneously ran Spybot, Ad-aware and the slightly modified GIANT application (MS hasn't completely rebranded it into their own product yet). It was unclear how they performed speedwise, though all three scanned my machine in under 20 minutes. Ad-aware found 2-4 minor problems and a bunch of things that can be ignored. Spybot found a few cookies, etc. Both had been run before on this machine and I wasn't surprised to see it was 'clean.

Microsoft's product turned up 11 new problems. I was a bit surprised, but remember, each manufacturer has their own list of spyware so it is common for them to 'find' different problems. (Hence it is common to run 2 or more apps on a machine). The software ran easily, cleaned the problems without screaming too loudly and offered to load some 'security agents' to minimize future problems. A few minutes ago I loaded the beta onto my home machine. It found one new problem and identified a number of P2P applications that I told it to ignore for the time being.

So far I'm impressed. It is a fairly untested product that had a bright interface, was easy to use and did not have a complicated set of options (unlike Spybot's advanced features). It did what it was supposed to do and doesn't appear to have caused any problems. I think it's worth trying on a machine that isn't mission critical. For anything else, I would wait for beta 2. You can give it a run on a desktop/workstation. Play with the features and see what you think of it. I'm happy and intend to leave the 'agents' running in the background to see how they work. Will I throw out the other two applications? No, all three can easily fit on my drive for the occasional run.

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