Jeckles, the voices in my head say, you claim you’re a geek but all you talk about is backpacking and politics. To satisfy the voices, I offer the following:

Let the geek talk begin. I have had to clean up a lot of spyware over the last two years, at work, at friend’s and family’s homes, even a little bit at home. The tried and true tools I have used are AdAware and Spybot S&D. As insidious as the spyware is, it seems to require both of these tools to clean it all up. The good news is that they are free. The bad news is that, recently, they seem to be unable to get some of the newer malware that is out there. There are anti-spyware software packages you can pay for, but personally I won’t sink any money into them while I can still get the free tools to do the job.

I had heard that Microsoft was releasing an anti-spyware tool. It is in beta right now (and it’s free) so I thought I should check it out. It irked me from the get go, because Microsoft want to make sure that I had a valid version of Windows installed before it let me download it. That really ticks me off. My version is valid. That is not the problem. Get ready for the mini-rant. The problem is the notion of providing support and patches only for valid versions. I am sorry that people steal Microsoft’s products, but that is no excuse to allow those pirated versions to become little cess pools of viruses, spyware, and zombie spammers. The existence of those kinds of boxes will only diminish the security of all the valid Windows installations out there. Mini-rant done, sorry.

Otherwise the tool worked fairly well. It sound some residual files from spyware I had previously cleaned off the test machine. My only complaint is that it categorized VNC as a threat. VNC could bee used maliciously, but is mostly used as a tool by admin types like me. The interface was smooth and friendly. It has a seamless autoupdate feature that is great. Plus it also includes some useful system tools like, a Privacy Tool that let’s you get rid of various temporary files and a System Explorer that gives lots of useful info about what is on your PC. The real test will come when I have an infected machine to work with. For now, I’m keeping it in my anti-spyware “toolkit,” and hoping that it improves as it goes through the beta process.