patndoris TechnoGeek

No doubt, by now you’ve realized the importance of spyware and malware protection. If you haven’t (imagine a wagging finger) shame on you! Still, I’m going to persevere in my quest to make you spyware free (at least for a few minutes in time). I’m trying to move in a logical progression (as logical as I’m capable of that is). And no, the big S does not stand for Superman it stands for SuperAntiSpyware.

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Like Ad-Aware, SuperAntiSpyware does not require a lot of knowledge to use. It’s pretty much run and clean. Yes, it’s really that simple. It’s also a very powerful cleaner. In fact, it’s usually the first one I run each week in my personal clean-up routine. It finds the most things on my machine, and it’s incredibly easy to use. I tried to find a nifty tutorial on the installation and use, but it’s really quite simple to install (meaning I didn’t find anything terribly nifty to share with you). I did find this tutorial on Help2Go and I’m including the link for those who may feel nervous about installing programs, but the short version is to let it install where it wants to and you’re pretty much done.

The one thing I don’t care for is SuperAntiSpyware is set up automatically to run at startup. You’ll notice a little yellow beetle-bug in your system tray. You can change this setting easily enough by double clicking on the beetle-bug, and choosing the Preferences option. Uncheck the option for Start SUPERAntiSpyware when Windows Starts. That will take care of that.

As with many other such programs, they are only useful if the definition file is updated. When you launch the program the beetle-bug magically appears in the system tray. Double click it to open, and a window should pop up prompting you to check for updates. It is critical you do this. If it does not prompt you, go through the manual steps to do it. Scanning with out of date definitions will do you very little good. With new threats every day, updating all your malware programs every time you run is essential.

Then, it’s as simple as doing a scan! You should scan your entire drive (or drives if you have more than one) each week if time allows. I must warn you, this program takes a long time to run. On my machine it averages just over 2 hours. Sadly, there is no progress bar, although you can see the file names flashing by and the number of files scanned. If you are pressed for time, do a quick scan, but be sure to run the full scan at least once a month - and that’s the absolute minimum!

When it’s done, it will bring up a box showing the number of issues found. You can click to close this and the window will appear with the full listing of items. Let it fix them, reboot if requested and you’re good to go! That is, until I write again…