Spybot Comments

I can't give an opinion on anything but the main version, but...

As a malware scanner it's not so great. It used to be very good but it's been surpassed. It will find some things other programs miss but not much, and it takes a long time to run- I can quick scan with MBAM and SAS in less than 5 minutes per program, whereas Spybot only does full scans and it does so by going through a malware list instead of scanning files like other programs do. Maybe this catches certain things better but it's a slow scan to get through almost 900K malware definitions.

However, I do find its immunizations helpful and the program should be installed for them. Between Spybot's immunizations and NoScript I haven't had an infection in some time, and a lot of what was hitting me did so through Firefox but not since I immunized. The only drawbacks have been Firefox taking a bit longer to start(maybe 3-5 seconds as opposed to instant to get the home page to load) and some websites with a check box to keep me logged in do not seem to do so for some reason, but they're minor as worth it to avoid being hit by something.

I also have only used the installed version but my experience has been it has caught minor (harmless but annoying) spyware that SAS and MBAM Pro have missed or ignored. The scans don't take all that long on my desktop; in fact, they take less time than MBAM Pro and AVAST! free (I have enough RAM and CPU power I can run AVAST!, MBAM, SAS, and Spybot all at the same time). I agree that Spybot's immunizations prevent a lot from getting through (I haven't had a positive on MBAM or SAS since I started using Spybot again).

Since I don't use my notebook anymore except when on a trip, I don't run any scans or updates until a few days before I leave. It has only and i3 and 4GB RAM so I have to run one scan at a time. I just let them run while I do other things so I don't care how long they take.