One of the most well-known free packages, Spybot Search and Destroy has a fairly
straightforward interface, though it lacks the graphical polish of some of the competition.

It scanned quickly and found a reasonable number of problems on the system, but cleaning was hampered by dialogue boxes that couldn’t be resized and had two main buttons, neither of which was legible since they were overlapped by the window border – hopefully not an issue with every graphics card and driver.

The results display, though, is clear and simple to understand, with real threats in red, and usage tracks – cookies and so on – in green, with explanations that will help you decide whether or not some products need to be removed.

Spybot was one of only a few products in the test to spot the Backweb process that our HP PC uses to provide update notifications, and adding it to the whitelist was very simple.

The documentation and links to help you find details about different pieces of spyware are some of the most useful things in this program. This can help make it much easier to track down the culprits, if you’re unsure which application let the spyware in. But ultimately, after running Spybot Search and Destroy, we still had a
hijacked home page and pop-up ads.

Download the software by clicking here.