MS/Giant Anti-Spyware beta released

MS has officially released the beta of their new anti-spyware tool, based on the Giant product that they acquired, link is here.

Just downloaded and installed it myself, and my initial impression is pretty positive, looks like it could prove to be a very good tool for the average user. It's very slick and user-friendly.

It did find two files when I ran it initially (1 spyware, 1 ad-ware and neither were cookies). I'm going to reserve judgement on that, since I just did a clean install of XP SP2 less than a month ago, use ZA Suite & SpyBot TeaTimer as my active defense and don't use IE for anything other than WinUpdates or our corporate intranet. Neither Spybot or Ad-Aware has ever picked up anything non-cookie related on any of my systems, so I'm going to investigate this a little further.

In retrospect, I should have run SpyBot or AAW prior to the MS tool in order to truly gague effectiveness, but hindsight is 20/20.

Anyways, I'd recommend it as being worth a look. Installed fine on my system, no hiccups and no noticeable resource hogging. It's also got some useful extras that display BHO's, system files etc. with safe/dangerous/unknown descriptions, a la Spybot but a little clearer.

Cheers,
KV

Pity the beta only supports Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server™ 2003

Giantantispyware supported 98 and ME..

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Pity the beta only supports Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server™ 2003

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I had the same thought. But it's no secret MS wants pre-2k Windows to go far far away. They officially still support 98 and ME for some issues but they don't want to...

This beta version will expire in 206 days. What will happen after?

I'd have a very, very close look at what it finds and calls spyware before I let it delete anything.

I just tried it out and it came back with a lot of false postives. It found the download manager I use, Flashget (paid version) and told me that every file in its folder and every entry in the registry was a hit and wanted to delete them all.

It also found dozens of entries/URLs I'd put in my IEX restricted zone and said they were spyware as well.

It didn't find anything legit... I regularly scan with spybot, adaware and spysweeper.