I currently have AVG (free download) and Ad-aware Personal on pc. Have had healthcheck at PC world who say we need Spysweeper as integral firewall and spyware not strong enough. A colleague has now suggested adding Zonealarm (free download) and have now added CCleaner also. Should I delete the AVG and Ad-aware? Confused totally!! Please help!! Thanks.

No you dont have to pay to have a well secured computer. Here is our spyware removal guide which has programs that will sufficiently protect your computer for free.
http://forum.ccleaner.com/index.php?showtopic=3505


Zone Alarm Free edition is also very good. It will protect your system.
AVG is good but not the best. You could either keep it or grab this 1 year free trial for etrust(very good AV)
http://www.my-etrust.com/SubscriptCenter/M...gistration.aspx

So no you don't need to buy spysweeper.

keep AVG but get rid of Ad-Aware.

What? Bad advice.

(rridgely, instead of badges for the known-good solutions providers, howabout badges for the known-bad )

What you need to protect your computer is

• 1 (one) anti-virus program. AVG has a very good reputation, so keep it.
• 1 (one) firewall. ZoneAlarm has been proven strong for many years, so I recommend to install it. Disable Windows firewall if you are on Windows XP.
• 1 or more anti-spyware products. There are many, many around - some causing more problems than they solve. Known trustworthy programs are
  • Spybot Search & Destroy (free)
  • Ewido Security Suite (free and licensed versions available)

Microsoft's free Windows Defender is still in beta, and many people have problems with the automated update.
Ad-aware has lost its previously good reputation and has become quite useless. I have uninstalled it from all computers under my control. (In another forum it has recently been called "way past its sell-by-date"; I agree).

Inevitably sooner or later someone will recommend you some Norton/Symantec products. Stay away from them! Damage to your Windows system is practically guaranteed if you let Symantec touch your computer.

accually it's not. Ad-Aware is a useless and bloated application. Ad-Watch also sucks.

I personally recommend Spybot over it(with current Updates, an Immunized system, TeaTimer, and the IE Plugin)

OK I'll put my two cents worth in.

I run a minimum of security apps realtime.ZAP is the only app that kicks in at startup.This is mainly used for app control as I have a hardware firewall.

FF with adblock plus and noscript extensions kicks in through Sandboxie.(Great little software).

Sure I have Etrust vet,Superantispyware and Ewido beta 4 but are used as on demand only which never find a thing after emptying the sandbox.

IMHO Sandboxie protects against inet borne malware better than any realtime scanner.

But we are all different.If your setup works fine then be happy.

Bloated? Currently adaware takes up 2.63mb on my pc.
If you don't like adwatch just use the free version but its a known fact that neither adaware or spybot catch everything which is why you need them both(plus a few others) to keep your pc clean.

In recent time I find that spybot is falling behind others in detections and updates. The immunize is good but Spyware Blaster does it better(even spybot says so).

So yeah that was a bad suggestion.

Windows Firewall is better than nothing, and it's the firewall I use (and please not damned lecture from anyone about its failings as I already know of them fully). However, with most modern software-based firewalls such as ZoneAlarm Free, and Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall there's no need to manually disable Windows Firewall as they automagically do that during install, whatsmore they re-enable it during uninstall.

And Ad-Aware is not bloated, it's a much needed security app in the removal of adware/spyware, there's no need to turn people away from it using negative untrue comments.

Just in case people didn't know, the ad-aware forums have re-opened and can be found here,

http://www.lavasoftsupport.com/

hazelnut: cool!

I use Ad-Aware and Spybot about 30 times per week, every week, every month, every year. I do this for a living and leaving out Ad-Aware would be fatal to my routine.

heh, the forums timed out and caused me to double post.


vvv what's your problem

i agree with you on the fact that spybot or ad-aware don't catch everything, but i personally would recommend spybot over ad-aware. first of all, it might use less memory because it isn't skinned, it has TeaTimer which has better registry handling than Ad-Watch(it was a nightmare when i used it), it has an Immunization feature(which i'm not sure works but it's still nice to have it), and i just like it better.

also another thing that a LOT of users don't like to do is scan the comp with anti-spyware or even anti-virus programs because it takes a long time(up to 1 or 2 hours). so just blocking the stuff before it gets to the comp is sooo much better than waiting to scan and then get rid of it.

There is no need to take my quote out of context; it was after the sentence where I recommended to install ZoneAlarm. It is pointless to have Windows Firewall active if you have ZoneAlarm installed.

Whoa! I'm assuming you mean on more than one computer, right? I run Spybot S&D and Ad-Aware maybe once a month... not that I recommend this to other users! But I'm tired of running scans just to come up clean every time. If I want to spin my platters, I'll just re-encode my audio library or something productive like that.

And JohnDemo, I too used to dislike Ad-Aware very much, but it is starting to grow on me, because it does indeed detect items that Spybot misses (even if it takes a meg or so more of RAM to do it).

Yeah, I work on customer machines all day, every day.