Best Anti-Spyware Scanners & Removers

While viruses remain still the biggest threat to internet security, spyware is a close second.  Essentially spyware is software that aids in gathering information about a person or organization without their knowledge and that may send such information to another entity without the consumer's consent, or that asserts control over a computer without the consumer's knowledge.

Spyware can collect almost any type of data, including personal information like Internet surfing habits, user logins, and bank or credit account information.

Spyware can also interfere with user control of a computer by installing additional software or redirecting Web Browsers. 

Thankfully there are ways to combat it.

My overall #1 pick for Spyware removal, hands down:

MALWAREBYTES  ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) 

This one is a no-brainer.  For several years now Malwarebytes has been protecting systems with the top of the line malware scanner and remover.  It picks up stuff your anti-virus misses and allows you to safely remove it.

They have a paid and free version built around the same scanning technique but the plus offers better real time blocking before you are infected whereas the free version is suited to cleaning it up after you are infected.

Perhaps it's best feature is that you can burn a rescue disk with Malwarebytes to recover systems that are infected to a degree that the anti-virus and spyware scanners are turned off by the intrusion.


Another decent anti-spyware product :

ADAWARE ([You must be registered and logged in to see this link.])

Once the king of anti-spyware, Adaware has taken a back seat to Malwarebytes in recent years. Still a great product. 

They also have similar free and paid versions.

My advice is to download both products and scan at least once a week taking time to update the definitions before scanning. 

The beauty of anti-spyware as opposed to anti-virus software is you can install more than one anti-spyware product and it shouldn't affect the other one.

If anyone has anything to add, please feel free to let us know..

I put malwarebytes on a friend's pc and told her to use it, especially if her pc was having any problems. Well her pc slowed down to a crawl and instead of scanning with malwarebytes she took her laptop into a repair guy and paid $150 to have it cleaned out. After she got it home I took a look and found that 15 minutes before he called her to pick it up that the malwarebytes log showed that it had found a virus during the scan and he had removed it.

Now if she had just done the scan herself she could of saved $150.

Malwarebytes does work on W8 and as far as SnapDo is concern I googled it and found where the malwarebytes forum states to download and run Junkware Removal Tool first and then download and run AdwCleaner and after that to run malwarebytes so it looks like malwarebytes is unable to remove SnapDo by it self.