Review by Jerry Saperstein

Anti-virus and spyware programs offer some of the choicest morsels in the freeware phenomenon.

This program is typical of its commercial genre: big, slow and a resource hog. Anti-virus and spyware programs should be left to run t night or whenever else you are not using the computer.

I don’t have any kind of formal procedure for testing spyware programs. I run a commercial anti-virus and spyware package and occasionally run freeware programs to see how each performs against the others. PCTools Spyware Doctor isn’t perfect when measured against competitors. It didn’t miss anything on my pretty clean system, nor did it find anything the others didn’t. Identifying actual malware from entities such as legitimate Registry entries and Cookies is as tedious as it is with other programs and not as bad as some others. The great danger of these programs is that for many users, they are dangerous weapons - it is very simple to delete a critical Registry entry.

Overall, I think experienced users would probably be just as happy - if not happier - with one of the well known freeware products. Inexperienced users might be better served with a better featured program that includes anti-virus capabilities.

Jerry