It may be superfluous at this point, but it runs in the background with no conflicts, and zero drag on the system. It may not be necessary, but it does it's job. A Guy
I do not think that it runs in the background; but maybe the paid version does. As far as I know, if you pay for SpywareBlaster, it will automatically update the list of "bad stuff". I hope that this is done via a scheduled task so that you don't pay just to have another item running all of the time. They do not come out with updates every often.
I work with some pretty weak hardware (XP OS and IE8) and I had to stop using this tool on those systems because it does drag down IE. On "normal" hardware you should barely notice it; but wait, there's more*.
SpywareBlaster does lots of wonderful things but the main two things are, it:
...blocks cookies from certain domains
...blocks ActiveX stuff (<< like that technical term
I'll zero in on the cookie part for IE.
You can manually add these domains:
Control Panel >
Internet Options >
Privacy (tab) >
Sites (button) >
...type in the domain and hit the button named Block
SpywareBlaster does this "typing" for you by writing the list of sites to be blocked directly into the registry. As of 28 Feb 2013; it clocks 16017 domains.
Sadly, each time you open IE, it reads every last one of these domain names into RAM from the registry. On my system (with an SSD) that adds about 3 seconds to IE9's load time (as measured by Process Monitor) (home page = about:blank). On a weaker system, it was more like 30 seconds (and that is with XP's registry files defragged).
In my testing shown below, IE opened a parent instance that "watched over" the four "surfing children" instances. Each instance of IE loads these domains and that adds to the load time and RAM that each instance occupies - but only a few MB for each instance.
With SpywareBlaster
Without SpywareBlaster
*There are a lot of pretty bad websites on the SpywareBlaster's list of domains, I would rather that they use the HOST file and keep user from visiting the sites altogether. IE loads a 15000 entry HOST file in less than 0.03 seconds (as measured by Process Monitor with the DNS service off).
I'm not attempting to talk people out of using SpywareBlaster - just yammering on about weak hardware.
It does not interfere with any other (legit) application.
