Windows Defender

Has anybody tried this and formed an opinion? Like, is it better than other anti-spyware progs?

I have "Defender Beta" running on my PC, as to is reliabillity it's hard to say as I also have other products installed. I've run scans with it and it has removed some items, however when I run spybot it finds others. The only thing I can think is it's either "not very good or it only checks some areas" which in itself is not good. So far i'm not all that impressed, but it's early days.

I use Mozilla Firefox for all internet use where possible, which I find more stable than Internet Explorer, once it's installed and the add-ons have installed themselves it's quicker then IE, it also doesen't have the same security probs as IE. I tend not to trust new products from Microsoft, but am willing to give then a try, at the first sign of problems though, it's removed VERY quickly.

As it is a Microsoft product it may only scan items when using IE, if that is the case maybe I should remove it anyway. Does anyone know the answer to this.

Salem.

You will always get varying results and it's difficult to rate one product against another.

Also, one mans spyware is anothers valid Browser Helper Object etc.

IMHO, Defender is pretty good, but I also use Hijack This.

I run defender b2 on a few machines, it seems fine enough but on one machine in particular (I havnt, and dont intend do monitor other software on the machines) it doesnt have crawl to a halt, not too bad on the others but a small slowdown is there if you look for it. It doesnt seem to find as many unwanted objects as adaware (went to a few sites to give it a very brief test some time ago). I also use hijack-this. It is still in beta so who knows how much it may yet change.

I already have AdAware and Norton; I tried Defender and it said it found a Trojan (it later found it again, so I emptied the recycling bin and the norton bin, it didn't come back.

It didn't give me info about the Trojan like Norton does, so I don't know if it wa a genuine problem.