Webroot Spy Sweeper 4.5 Review
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Product: Spy Sweeper 4.5 Price: $29.95 per year Company Info: Webroot Software |
Spy Sweeper Review
Webroot’s Spy Sweeper is an effective standalone tool for detecting, removing, and blocking spyware.
As of October 2005, it contains over 110,000 spyware signatures (although many of these are tracking cookies). In our spyware effectiveness test, Webroot detected 78% of spyware and disabled 73% of it, making this one of the better programs in terms of sheer effectiveness.
Spy Sweeper can can detect spyware running in memory, stop browser hijackings, examine your startup settings, remove tracking cookies, and eliminate registry changes made by intruding programs. It does a good job eliminating tough-to-remove spyware that often evades detection or removal with lesser products by removing it during the next boot cycle. It can even detect when new spyware tries to install itself while you are surfing.
After removing offending spyware, Spy Sweeper will immunize your computer against certain kinds of "repeat offenders" such as browser hijackings and tracking cookies. We discovered no problems on either Windows XP or Windows 2000.
Usability
Spy Sweeper has the kind of slick interface one expects with modern utilities. You interact with the program primarily through a toolbar on the left that offers you a few simple choices … but in practice, only one, "Sweep Now", is necessary.
After starting a sweep, Spy Sweeper will perform an in-depth scan of your system. A few minutes later you’ll be shown all spyware that was detected on your system. Webroot isn’t the fastest anti-spyware of the bunch, but this isn’t because of poor performance. Rather, it's because it scans every file on your hard drive instead of taking hueristic short-cuts that can lead to missed spyware.
One issue that we've had, and continue to have, with Webroot Spy Sweeper is the massive number of pop-up alerts. Installation took over 20 minutes, in part because of an alert that Rundll32.exe was trying to install a BHO. We continually dismissed this alert only to have it pop up again and again. The alert continued to pop up over a dozen times while we were scanning the system.
The same alert window popped up repeatedly during testing and wouldn't go away.
Removal
When the scan is complete, Spy Sweeper gives you a detailed report of all the spyware on your system. You can easily choose to leave certain programs installed. You might want to do this, for instance, because many free programs (such as Kazaa) will not work without their embedded spyware. If you’re the curious type and like to poke under the covers, Spy Sweeper will give you a brief description directly in the window, along with a "more details" button that will bring up an informative description of the piece of software in question.
We put Spy Sweeper through our brutal Spyware Effectiveness Test. After a 25 minute scan, it detected 78% of the spyware and disabled 73% of it. Spy Sweeper did not flag any legitimate applications as spyware. These test results are considerably improved since the last time we tested Spy Sweeper (June) and it shows that a considerable amount of improvement has gone into the software.
One point regarding removal that really stands out with Spy Sweeper is that it successfully removed CoolWebSearch from our test PC - something very few other products can do. This alone may be reason enough to buy this program should you continue to have recurring popups with another product. (In fact, during this latest round of testing we found that many spyware programs have actually gotten much
tougher to remove so it's generally a good idea to have two programs on hand just to make sure).
Quarantine
So what happens if you do remove spyware and find out later that it was necessary to run one of your favorite applications? Spy Sweeper quarantines spyware in a special folder in case you’d like to recover it later.
Other Options
Spy Sweeper offers a number of other options, including the requisite scheduler, the ability to scan certain drives (useful for USB flash drives), and immunization functionality.
The immunization functionality can be customized. You can activate or deactivate shields which will guard against home page hijackings, tracking cookies, and in-memory spyware. In particular, this last option could come in handy on slower computers, which need all the performance you can squeeze out of them.
Customer Support
Webroot provides excellent customer support and a "no questions asked" refund policy. We received a number of complaints earlier this year about poor customer support, but we haven't received any recently so they may have cleared up any problems they were having.
Summary
Webroot's Spy Sweeper is one of the better products out there, with an impressive 73% removal rate. It even completely removed CoolWebSearch, something few other products do. However, it is a resource hog and the constant popup alerts make it difficult to keep this program running at all times. While we don't consider it the top program available, it would make an excellent backup program should you continue to have popups and other spyware-related problems after trying a different product.
Purchase Price: $29.95 (1 year), $39.95 (2 years - 33% savings)
Free Trial: Yes