About a year ago I reviewed SpyEraser which is a Spyware removing program from Uniblue. Recently they came out with version 2 of SpyEraser and they sent me a copy.

Features

• Powerful Heuristic threat analysis tools
• Real Time Online Defense protection
• Intelligent Control Functions
• Exceptionally Simple to Use
• Safe and Trusted

I asked the company what had changed in this new version, they said they had fixed some bugs, improved the UI and enhanced the scanning. Because these are fairly vague answers, I will be going through the entire program and looking at all the features.

Spyware can be very dangerous. If it is allowed to get on your computer it can cause havoc with your computer, steal your personal information, or even crash your computer or destroy your personal data. These problems range from adware and popups, to destructive attacks from backdoors, exploits and downloaders. All the more reason to have protection. SpyEraser 2 is one of those forms of protection.

One of the main problems with current anti-spyware programs is keeping up with the flood of new types of spyware. Every day new types of spyware are showing up, and they are finding new ways of infecting your computer. Some of the symptoms of a spyware infection include: sluggish performance, annoying popups, default internet homepage changes, search results look strange, and an unexplained increase in your phone bills which can be caused by dialers. In order to deal with this, SpyEraser 2 offers real time online defense protection. What this means is that if you have an “always on” internet connection, then SpyEraser 2 will continuously scan for new threats and new updates so that you always have the best protection.

SpyEraser 2 includes an Alert function that will warn you about new malware threats and new variants of existing threats. There is also a Safe List function which minimizes annoying and frequent alarms. The Quarantine function deals with what slips through, easily, in seconds.

In order to provide the best scan possible the SpyEraser 2 scanner not only uses rules and lists of known trouble makers, but they also use heuristics which look for key identifiers so that if a new program comes along they can do a good job of telling if it is bad or good.

Design

The interface for SpyEraser 2 is very well laid out. It is actually very similar to the original SpyEraser except for some color changes and enhancements to the overview page. There are a group of tabs across the top of the window, this is how you access all the functionality of Spyeraser 2. The first tab is the overview screen. This screen gives you the low down on the current status of the computer and the software. Here you will see when the last scan was run and what the results of the scan were. At the right of the screen is the spyware definitions date, so you know if your version is up to date. In addition, this program is set up to work with other Uniblue software and if you have them installed you can see their status at the bottom of this screen. The left side of the screen is dominated by a large diplay that shows the current system status.

The next tab is the Spyware Scan. This screen is where you can start a manual scan and view the results of the last scan. In addition to starting the scan, you can also choose what area of the computer to scan. The options are: Memory, Files, Registry Keys, and Cookies. You can choose all or only one of them. Along the left side of this screen is a new set of tabs. These tabs control and give you access to everything that has to do with spyware. The first tab is where you start and it is the spyware scan. The next one down is the scan results of the last scan, if any spyware is found it will be displayed here. The next tab is the Scheduler. This is where you set the scanning schedule. You can choose how often you want your automatic scans to run. The Quarantine tab is where SpyEraser 2 will list all the programs that you have quarantined. The logs tab keeps track of everything you have done. Ignore List is a list of files that you do not what to have scanned. Under the Restore Deleted tab you will see a list of all the files you have chosen to delete, you can also restore any of these files.

The third tab across the top is Live Guard. This page also has a set of its own tabs on the left side. The first of these tabs is Internet. This tab lists several built-in guards which work continuously to protect your computer. You can see a description and status of each guard at the bottom of the screen. You can also turn each guard on and off with the buttons that are below the description. These particular guards are for protecting your internet experience. The next tab is System. This tab does exactly the same thing as the Internet Guard, except the guards on this one are for protecting your system. The next tab is Application. Again, this is just like the other two except this one guards the programs that are installed on your computer. The Block Events tab shows all the programs that you have blocked. The All Events tab shows all the events that have occurred. The Blocked Programs tab will stop any program in the list from running.

The last tab across the top is Settings. This is were you can configure some things about SpyEraser 2. The first set of items you can configure in the General tab are some startup options. Things like auto start when the computer starts, and show splash screen when SpyEraser 2 starts. You can also configure if any alerts are displayed when a program is blocked or allowed. The next tab is Restrictions. Here you can actually disable certain programs and prevent them from running. Some of these programs include: Registry Editor, Control Panel, and Task Manager. Drives to scan lets you configure which drives you want SpyEraser to scan.

Performance

Using SpyEraser 2 is very easy to do; most of it is actually automatic. Once it is installed and setup SpyEraser 2 runs in the background monitoring your computer for problems. Sometimes you will see a little popup letting you know that a program has been blocked or allowed to pass. Scanning my hard drive did not take long. It took about 8 minutes, and I have a very large hard drive. SpyEraser 2 also takes about 38 MB of ram while it is running.

Once you have scanned your hard drive you are presented with a list of programs and files that SpyEraser 2 thinks are bad. SpyEraser 2 will automatically rank the programs and files and choose an action that it thinks is appropriate. You then can accept the action that the program has chosen or you can change it. You have several options at this point. The options you can choose are Ignore, Ignore Always, Quarantine, and Remove. Below the list of programs is a checkbox labeled Remove All Threats. When you select this box it will automatically change all the actions to Remove. Below that you can choose to create a restore point and then click the Clean System button and start the process of clearing the system of spyware.

During all my testing I never once had any trouble with SpyEraser 2 messing up my computer or corrupting my registry.

The final question is how well does SpyEraser perform against other popular spyware scanning programs. To test this I downloaded and installed several programs and then made sure that each was up-to-date with whatever downloads they needed. Then I ran a scan with each of them. The first one was Spybot, it took about 15 minutes to run and it found 23 problems. The next program was SpyEraser, it took about 7 minutes and found 26 problems. Next, I ran Windows Defender, this program did not find any problems and took 5 minutes to run. Finally, Spyware doctor took 1 minute and found 66 problems. As you can see from the results SpyEraser did not find the most spyware, but it also did not find the least.

Warranty and Support

Uniblue offers support for SpyEraser 2 through the website. There are places where you can submit questions and where you can read frequently asked questions.

Conclusion

SpyEraser 2 is really great to use and does a good job. It is also not very expensive and only costs $29.95. I can recommend this to you, knowing that if you do get it, it will perform very well and keep your computer clean from most spyware.

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• Review: Uniblue SpyEraser
• Review: Uniblue PowerSuite
• Review: Uniblue DriveScanner
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