Ad-aware <=> Spybot

I just got Spybot myself. I believe the ones in green are OK to leave on.

 

my own practice is to bust 'em all... everything goes! the fact that SB has a recovery feature, and that all "fixed" items are zipped and stored in the recovery folder gives me greater confidence that if i remove something i want back, i can recover it... as long as i haven't purged the recovery files, which i do periodically.

as a useful tip, did you know you could configure SB to Select all items ?

i think you might also benefit, in trying to decide what is safe to "fix" and what isn't, by doing some more research at the SB site.

check out patrick's dictionary to help you decide what should stay and what should go.

take a look at all of the spybots and adbots that SB detects...

and get an even deeper display of the knowledge base threats by selecting one and clicking on "display entry ".

after spending some time doing this, i'm sure you will have a real good idea of what the entries mean.

hth



mark

 

quicker? i don't think so. not when you ask a question ( "Is there any reason why they shouldn´t be removed? ") that is bound to get you a bunch of different answers.

that's why i suggested specific places to look on the SB site. i din't just say "go read it ", did i? <g>

as i look over the many responses and opinions on these SpyBot threads, i see folks saying they only delete the red marked entries, and i see folks saying they blast them all.

the SB home page will define these entries for you and enable you to come up with your own plan.



mark

 

he not busy being born is busy dying - bob dylan

 

I'm not on my own pc right now to tell you exactly where, but you can go into the Cookies Excludes list and check off those cookies you want to keep (LIKE THOSE FROM THIS SITE) before "blasting away" the rest from Cookies and Temporary Internet Files. I use Spybot as a cookie manager that way since the cookies excluded from deletion will remain 'protected' until you uncheck them frfom the excluded cookies list..

 

To be honest one of the main reasons I regularly run Spybot SD is to clean up cookies. The Excludes | Cookies featue makes it easy to keep the ones you want and delete the rest by selecting the Temporary Internet Files and Cookies items for removal. I check off both, to remove both the cookies and the TIF cookie pointers.

As far as other "usage tracts" (items in green) I generally leave them alone since no one uses this pc except for me and my husband and HE doesn't worry me In fact I prefer having a record of things like log files, recently opened files and download locations. As far as I know the main reason to be concerned about usage tracts would be to protect your privacy if you share your computer with other people.

 

To control cookies there are all sorts of simple programs--much simpler than Spybot.
I use Cookie Jar
http://www.jasons-toolbox.com/cookiejar.asp
Basically, you run a scan and it tells you what cookies have been added since you last scanned with CJ. You then get to keep or delete, or even put on a banned list.

 

Hi Jim,

I only run Spybot SD every month or so and at least the cookie management gives me a reason to run it since it rarely finds anything interesting.

 

Jim & Alice,

I must say that SpyBot fits me to a tee. The cookies I need aren't dynamic so once I set them, SpyBot preserves them for me and dumps all others.

Then of course, you need to opt for the "Expert Buttons" in SpyBot (options) so you can then have the "Select All" button available in the normal screen. With that and having exempted my favorite cookies, I just dump all the rest. It couldn't be much easier.

 

The "select all items" button was already available on the results screen Since I don't want to remove all usage tracts, only IE cookies and IE Temporary Internet Files, I've never used the Select all items button.

I found the "Show expert buttons in Results list" option under Settings/Settings/Expert settings and checked it. What that does is place a new button called "File Sets" on the results screen and that lets you chose between "Select all available checks, Spyware check only, Usage Tracts check only, and Minimal Spyware check (whatever that is).

Thanks for the tip on the Expert settings option. I used my new "File Sets" button to do a quick check for usage tracts using the "Usage Tracts check only" option and saw what categories of items were being selected.

I've already excluded a number of items using the Excludes/Products/tracts.utii tab, stuff like Mozilla, Netscape Messenger, MS Paint, MS Wordpad, WinZip, etc, so I went back to that tab and checked more items - MS DirectDraw, Logs, Windows, Windows Explorer - all stuff that was appearing in the results screen that I didn't want to delete. Then I ran another "usage tracts only" check and the only items left were Internet Explorer items:
IE Cookies
IE Download Directory
IE Last Used Directory
IE Temporary Internet Files
IE URL History
IEUser Agent

I guess I could right-click on everything except Cookies and Temporary Internet Files to "exclude this detection from future searches" at which point I could use the "select all items button" but now that the detections are down to just 6 items I think I can deal with finding the two items I want to delete