Webroot Spy Sweeper 4

W ebroot is one of the major movers in the Anti Spyware coalition, and its package is fairly well known. You can download and try it for 14 days without having to pay anything. There’s a good range of options, including protection ‘shields’ that you can turn on and off to prevent access to common ad sites, redirection of websites in your Hosts file and so on, along with a built-in scheduler.

In our tests we found that it detected a lot of the installed spyware, and claimed to remove it, but our test system hung during rebooting, and we had to disconnect the power before getting any further. Also, while Spysweeper told us it had cleaned the PC, we still had pop-up ads, toolbars and a hijacked home page – hardly the hassle-free environment we’d expected after being told the system was clean.

With the ad shield function turned on, the result was almost the worst of both worlds – the intrusive adware pop-ups still appeared, but pages on The Guardian website were full of errors from blocked ad banners. We’d probably have had better results by using a browser’s pop-up blocker. Despite being told to ignore it, each boot prompted a warning that there was an entry in the Hosts file for our Apple Idisk service. A shame, considering the reporting was concise and helpful, without being too alarming.