AdAware 6 vs Spybot S&D

Something I read on another site--anybody have any other opinions, Paul

AdAware 6 vs. Spybot S&D
As I was performing routine PC maintenance for my cousin's office last week, I came across one PC that had some spyware bits installed, so I decided to use the opportunity to see how the new AdAware 6 compared directly to Spybot S&D. I actually believed that AdAware 6 would do an adequate job, but I did expect a couple of differences in items detected. The two products won't ever be identical in detections, but what I found was truly shocking and reaffirms my support for Spybot S&D.

AdAware found 64 items including over 30 items that were installed by BrilliantDigital, but they had long since been removed, and remained within the System Restore areas of the hard drive. I really don't like any applications monkeying with the System Restore data. That's meant to be a snapshot of a known working configuration, and with the nature of spyware, removing one thing could break another, poisoning a potentially valuable System Restore snapshot. I'd prefer that it left well enough alone in this case. It's not active, so there's little danger in leaving it there. Now, on to what AdAware 6 missed:

New.net Uninstaller
DownloadWare - 6 registry entries and a directory
Cydoor - 2 registry entries
CommonName - Temporary Directory
Commission Junction - cookie
NewsUpdate: 5 registry entries and a directory
PromulGate: directory
Save Now - 2 registry entries

AdAware 6 was much more sensitive to cookies, flagging 22 versus S&D's 8, but they are the least threatening as far as real spyware is concerned. Coupled with the 32 system restore files, there were only 10 items that AdAware 6 picked up otherwise, whereas S&D identified 67 additional entries that posed a much greater potential threat. I truly expected more from AdAware given the number of months they had the world on hold while they worked on the new version. The fancy new interface is cute and all, but I'd much rather have S&D's rough GUI edges and far better detection.

 

IMHO they will each pick up something the other missed. I run them both.

 

I choose to run them both too. I never let AdAware delete anything, instead I place a block in the Privacy setting in IE6. That automatically dumps it from the TIF's and Cookies without further action and prevents its return. The beauty of that is, it protects me from dumping some False Positive file I may have created intentionally. That way I can actually have a gator.txt file if I so choose without it being trashed unintentionally.

Cheers.

 

These 2 engines differ quite a bit in their focus. While AdAware looks for bots, adware, and spyware, SpyBot also looks for instances of file histories.

Though SpyBot undoubtedly finds more, I find that many things it finds are things I don't want to lose, such as file histories, dll's related to Kazaa Lite which it misidentifies as belonging to Kazaa proper, and media databases. And it identifies many things as spyware that patently are not. They make an effort to contact companies about their products and you will see many retractions of previously banned software on their site. The "Use at your own risk" warning is there for a reason.

It is more important with SpyBot to prepare the exclusion list carefully, or to take some precautions, such as those suggested by Zephyr , if you don't want to lose some desirable things.

 

Thanks for the comparision guys. I'm new at this stuff and the info sure helps.
Paul