Has anyone tried the new "Windows AntiSpyware" from Microsoft? http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=321cd7a2-6a57-4c57-a8bd-dbf62eda9671&displaylang=en&Hash=SWPW8L6
I'm very impressed with the huge amount of features and options, looks like more features than SpyBot. A few tips: It can be running in the background to provide active monitoring, or kept off and only used to scan or only kept on if at "questionable websites". It's takes a while to go through *ALL* of its settings, so be sure to check out ALL of them, and disable the monitoring you don't need (like for example Messenger monitoring since we all should have that disabled, there's monitoring to keep your modem from dialing so if you're on broadband you should disable that, and there's several others many will not need). If you try it, note that it is Beta. I only installed it about an hour ago, so I don't know yet if it will cause any crashes or system problems. It appears to take up (on my PC) about 6-7mb when active in the background (in the System Tray). Now, for the problems. It tagged something on my PC and I'm thinking: "Hey this is great, it found something". What it found and tagged as SpyWare was "Search Squire" which is a tag in my RESTRICTED Sites zone I put there to keep them from placing their cookies and ActiveX on my PC! It's there to PREVENT anything from it being installed, loaded, etc. from Search Squire. This program is obviously not smart enough to know NOT to tag malware-named registry keys in the Restricted Sites zone. That's where they are SUPPOSED to be. Another problem,and this one in keeping with the long-standing M$ tradition; every click of every "learn more about [whatever]" or "Learn more about this object" on the program's interface, results in "The page cannot be displayed" and the pathetic thing is it's NOT a webpage from an outside source, but these are supposed to be HTML type info files from WITHIN the program opened by the program! (This same thing happens with the Windows OS Help and Support Center links from within a topic you may have looked up). Even worse, even the "Quick help" link is a bad link! The other issue is it will not load at startup. Even though I have the two boxes check to load for "Security Agents" and "Threat protection", plus I have the "Hide icon" box unchecked, it won't load with Windows. I cont-alt-del'd to see if it was only the icon problem, but nothing new is running, so it's really not loading. Now, it could be that its "protection" is running all the time, or should I say, active all the time like SpywareBlaster and SpyBot's SDD Helper, which aren't really running in the background, but have protection loaded all the time in the form of registry tags and the like. But if this is the case, then why when you exe the program then close it, it goes to the System Tray? So, we have no way of knowing if it's actually "on" and doing anything or not if it's not in the System Tray, until you go to a known threat and let it "do it's thing", then see if the software will stop it or alert you. Finally, when you open the main help file, it doesn't work. Clicking most of the entries at left do nothing! It stays on the main intro page. I'm hoping these things will be fixed in the Release version, but this program incredibly has no way of reporting bugs, so who knows. If it did, it would also probably be a bad link! Hee hee. Yes, I remember it's Beta. If anyone knows of some sites where it can be tested, please post them. -Clint Happy New Year to all & God Bless Clint Hamilton, Owner http://OrpheusComputing.com ) http://ComputersCustomBuilt.com ============= PCWorks Mailing List ================= Don't see your post? Check our posting guidelines & make sure you've followed proper posting procedures, http://pcworkers.com/rules.htm Contact list owner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Unsubscribing and other changes: http://pcworkers.com =====================================================
