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PC Advisor Best Buy

September 12, 2007

PC Tools Spyware Doctor 5.0

In tests performed by AV-Test.org, PC Tools Spyware Doctor 5.0 did an excellent job identifying and uprooting adware. Its results with spyware were less impressive but still pretty solid.


  • Operating system tested on: Windows Vista
  • $30 (about £15) for 1-year subscription

PC Tools Spyware Doctor 5.0 detected 81 percent of inactive adware samples and 100 percent of active adware samples, and it successfully removed almost all of those active adware samples. When it came to other intruders, however, PC Tools Spyware Doctor 5.0 spotted only 27 percent of our inactive banking-related spyware and 43 percent of password-stealing spyware. PC Tools Spyware Doctor 5.0 detected all our active spyware samples except the password-stealing Trojan horse PSW.Maran, and successfully cleaned up 70 percent of those infestations.

PC Tools Spyware Doctor 5.0 held up well in behaviour-based detection tests, too, detecting additions to HKCU and HKLM 'Run' Registry keys and preventing adware and spyware programs from changing Internet Explorer search and start pages. On the other hand, PC Tools Spyware Doctor 5.0 didn't detect changes to the Hosts file, which spyware can use to redirect your PC to a malicious website.

The settings on this otherwise well-designed program could use a little tweaking. By default, PC Tools Spyware Doctor 5.0 does not turn on anti-rootkit protection; this default is intended to speed up scanning and to minimise false positives. PC Tools Spyware Doctor 5.0 found eight of the nine inactive rootkit samples. We didn't like its habit of flagging ad-tracking cookies as 'infections', either.

The overzealous PC Tools Spyware Doctor 5.0 diagnosed 387 'infections' that turned out to be cookies from Google, the New York Times' website and other reputable sites. PC Tools provides free phone support around-the-clock for UK customers. For a small extra fee, PC Tools Spyware Doctor 5.0 offers antivirus protection, although we didn't test this for this round-up.

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User Reviews

Wednesday, 12 September 2007

Reviewed by dannot

Star Rating: rating of 2

Duration of ownership: 90 days

Strengths:
Finds a huge amount of problems Easy to use Good Value

Weaknesses:
Takes up all of the processing power and ram that your pc can muster leaving you in a state whereby you cannot do anything until it has finished loading and running

Overall Evaluation:
Give it a miss

Thursday, 13 September 2007

Reviewed by FatboySlim71

Star Rating: rating of 5

Duration of ownership: 80 days

Strengths:
I have found that it finds things that others have missed.

Weaknesses:
The ON GUARD can be a bit processor hungry

Overall Evaluation:
I have found that it finds things that others have missed, easy to use. I have found it best to set it off scanning at the end of the day before you shut down the PC as it is fairly resource hungry when running. Highly recommend it though!

Thursday, 13 September 2007

Reviewed by jdb

Star Rating: rating of 2

Duration of ownership: 3 years

Strengths:
Yes, presumably finds and deals with spyware etc (I've never had any ).

Weaknesses:
Totally takes over the PC so nothing else works until its finished! Very frustrating. Had this prog for 3 years inc V 3 &4 and have now junked it.

Overall Evaluation:
The most frustrating prog. I've ever used (even worse than Adobe products). As I'm careful what I download and websites I visit I've decided to ditch this prog.

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