I decided to give the top two spyware blockers on the market a run for their money. I took a clean machine and thought I would see how much spyware I could get it infected by. And then run the spyware blockers on it to see what they came up with and compare the results.

Spyware Doctor is undoubtedly the best seller in the market place. Spyware Doctor is created and distributed by PCTools. Spyzooka, from Blue Penguin Software, has been gaining ground lately, especially with their 100% guarantee of spyware removal.

So, to infect my machine I visited some shady sites and downloaded freeware that wasn’t very safe. It didn’t take long before the popup ads started appearing on my machine. Plus, browsing started to slow down. I assumed at this point I had been successful in getting my machine infected.

First, I downloaded and ran Spyzooka. First I did a quick scan – no infections. I then did a full scan – still no infections. I was a bit surprised by this. It did tell me however that if I sent the scan report to them they would make sure to send me a fix to remove any spyware present.

Next I ran Spyware Doctor. Again, first I did a quick scan – 100 infections! They were ;

69 application tracking cookies
25 adware advertising
6 rogue antispyware

The first two were low threat but the last was a medium. I ran the spyware doctor cleanup and hey presto my machine was back to normal!

Now, Spyzooka may well have come back and done the same job but I would have really wanted it to pick them up straight away.

I was very impressed with Spyware Doctor and in this test it is still one of the best spyware blockers around.