As you probably already know, programs you pay for offer more features and quality than programs you don’t. If you are looking for free spyware removal programs, you should know that they won’t be as powerful as the commercially available programs. That being said, there are a handful of decent spyware removal programs that you can download for free.
One of the best free programs is Spybot Search and Destroy. You can find this program at safer-networking.org. The software downloads in minutes and will protect you against all known spywares. The removal rate is around 70%, meaning that 70% of the things that get on your computer Spybot can remove. This is better than the Windows Defender program, which can remove about 60% of infectious spywares but nowhere near the quality of the commercial programs that range from 90% to 100% removal rates. Still, it’s free, and it has to be better than nothing.
Besides removing spyware from your computer, Spybot can clean up your user history. We tend to think of people spying on us via the net, but we also leave tracks all over the computer when we get off. If it is important to you that other users don’t know where you have gone when you’ve been online, you can clean usage tracks.
Other features of Spybot Search and Destroy are permanent blocking of cookies, removal of keyloggers, and detailed information about the problems that are found. Spybot even offers free email and forum support to its users.
Of course, there are plenty of other programs that you might use, Spybot just happens to be the one that came out on top in several comparisons. Another one of the best free spyware removal softwares comes from Lavasoft. Lavasoft may be the first company that offered free spyware removal, and it certainly has a good name in the industry. The free program Ad-Aware 2007 is the most popular free software, and the company’s website claims that the program is downloaded over a million times per week.
One benefit that Ad-Aware offers that Spybot does not, is user-controlled spyware removal. This means that you, as the user, decide what is and what is not spyware. This might be an invaluable feature if you have particular programs running on your computer that the anti-spyware software picks up as spyware. If you have the user-controlled feature, you simple click a button to allow the program to stay on your system.
There is plenty of other decent software available. You might go to thefreecountry.com to check out nearly a dozen of free anti-spyware programs. Besides the two just discussed, the site reviews SpywareBlaster, which prevents Active X controls from installing on your computer. It also offers a link to the free AVG Anti-spyware program that you can use to do a manual scan of your computer. Or maybe you are really computer savvy and will benefit from the manual program HiJackThis.
There are plenty of great options when looking for free software. Since the software is free, you might want to download more than one. A good combination of anti-spyware programs might be to download Ad-Aware, Spybot Search and Destroy, and Windows Defender. Downloading all three programs allows you to reap the unique protective benefits of each one.
The footprints of spyware removal software are small, meaning the programs will not take up much of your computer space. Even if your computer is old or small, you will still have room to download a couple of the free programs to keep your computer and your identity safe.
