Microsoft Antispyware Review

Product: Microsoft AntiSpyware Price: Unannounced Company Info: Microsoft Editor Rating: 3 stars

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Pros
+ Beautiful user interface
+ Decent spyware removal functionality
+ Additional "security agents" built-in

Cons
- Effectiveness has declined over previous two months
- Customer support will be questionable
- Constant, annoying pop-ups and other usability problems

Microsoft AntiSpyware Product Review

Giant Company, once known as a maker of anti-spam products for your inbox, hit it big in December, 2004. Microsoft purchased the company and is now planning on embedding it into Windows to address some of the glaring security issues IE users face.

Will it work? It seems that everything Microsoft touches becomes inherently insecure. Earlier this month, hackers created a worm that disabled Microsoft AntiSpyware. Furthermore, our latest test indicates that the effectiveness of the product has declined since December.

Still, the program offers some nice system browsers that let more technically-inclined users peek into the nooks and crannies of the operating system. These tools alone make the program a good backup anti-spyware tool, but not one that we would recommend as your primary line of defense.

Usability

Microsoft AntiSpyware has a well-designed user interface that is nice to look at, but can be a bit confusing for the novice user. What was once a simple and easy-to-use interface has become cluttered with statistics and other technical data that is irrelevant to the average user.

The program is unfortunately full of annoying usability problems. For instance, once you install the program, expect to be bombarded with annoying pop-up windows in the lower-right corner of your screen. These pop-up windows don't go away until you click on them, making the program almost as obnoxious as some of the spyware programs it's designed to get rid of.

Add to this the multiple "View Results" windows that appear after every scan. If you schedule spyware scans to be run at night, expect to have to click through a few of these windows before the program will allow you to remove any spyware.

Spyware Removal

Scanning was relatively fast, taking about 10 minutes on our test PC. However, the effectiveness of the program seems to have declined somewhat over previous months. We noticed that the program seemed to detect more spyware than the last time we checked it, but when we checked our spyware testing results, it actually detected a lower percentage of spyware than it once did (this was actually because we added more spyware programs to our test, not because any signatures were removed from the program). Overall, the program detected about 71% of the spyware in our test.

What was truly telling, however, is that only 57% of the spyware was actually disabled. Prior to the Microsoft acquisition, Giant had nearly a perfect "disable" record. This sloppiness suggests to us that the researchers at Giant have been replaced by less skilled (or perhaps, less motivated) researchers at Microsoft.

While removing spyware, we came across yet another annoyance with the product: if you specify a certain program to be ignored (such as Alexa Toolbar) and not treated as spyware, the program will ignore you. The program will continue to be detected each time a scan is run.

Rollback

Microsoft AntiSpyware allows you to rollback any changes it makes. This is helpful if you have wiped out spyware that is needed by an otherwise useful program (Real Player and Kazaa are typical examples of software embedded with spyware on your PC that won’t run without it).

Customer Support

What makes us most nervous about Microsoft is their historical lack of customer support. Can a company that makes millions of dollars charging large corporations for technical support effectively switch over to providing free customers support for end consumers? Probably not. Expect to have to dig through the Microsoft Knowledge Base for answers to your support questions in the future.

Other Options

Microsoft AntiSpyware includes a scheduler, as well as real-time "security agents" which protect against homepage hijacking and drive-by installs.

Summary

What was once a top-rated product has begun to get mired in Microsoft's corporate bureaucracy. The effectiveness of this product has slipped in the past two months and it's full of annoying usability problems. We recommend taking a pass, or at the most, using it as a backup solution to another product.