Xoftspy spyware remover

[Mobo]

The following review was done with great attention due to spyware 911.net being approached to affiliate our site with this software package.
As we know there are a great deal of bogus anti-spyware products on the net these days so we wanted to make absolute certian that what we were doing would be inline with our purpose os http://www.spyware911.net/forum/index.php?act=page&pg=asap. I should also note that this product was previously o the Spyware Warrior Rogue Application list but has since been removed after some revamping of the product.


On with the testing:
After loading the system soo badly that it locked up tighter than a dolphins rear end, I began scanning.

I first loaded the MVP hosts file .

Xoftspy detected those host file entries as trojans which I really didnt like too much, but there is the option in the scanner engine to opt from the host file scan. Also it should be said that some known trojand do infact add entries into the host file so its not that the detection was any sort of bogus finding. It do serve a purpose of alerting the user that entries have been infact added.

Xoftspy detected some 677 entries
Adaware Se detected 140
Then I attempted to clean with Xoftspy which did remove all it reported.
Adaware then followed which still reported 11 entries.
Adaware then cleaned up the remaining items.

Summary:
I guess I could live with it except for the $39.99 price tag to remove thte first trial scan findings. I would like to see perhaps a set number of removal abilities before purchase as most would like to completely sample before purchasing the full product. I would like to see the host file entries detection a little more tidy than reporting Trojans but like I said that option could be removed from the scan.

Overall I think its a better than average product and with a bit more work on the issue of buying before any removal ability is gained and that host detection it could be a solid spyware detection/removal program.

P.S--I then decided to run our integrated Xcleaner scanner and it picked up just three reg entries that needed to be removed.

The program is produced by Paretologic and it available for download http://www.paretologic.com/download.asp

[Mobo]

FYI to all who read the previous post. Since the time of posting that above review, I was contacted and agreed to affiliate with the prodcut . This would have had me place the image of the product here as well as a download and an affiliate button. As I was in the process of doing the changes I visited the link page the users would be taken to upon clicking the link and it was there that I reconsidered the whole process of affiliation.

Recently some of our more notable products, namely Spybot search and destroy have been taken advantage of. In promoting software a lot of advertisers would use the term spybot to attract hits. This was both confusing and unconspicuous to unassuming users. Some who thought they were downloading spybot search and destroy were infact downloading some unnamed bogus spyware and getting paid for those programs to add insult to injury. This cheated both the users and the copywright owner of Spybot-S&D.

Having been armed with this info and our mission to provide ethical, sound trustworthy service, we will not be promoting Xoftspy at this time.


More can be read here in regards to the Spybot terms being used at the Spybot Search and Destroy home site.
[url=http://www.safer-networking.org/en/news/2005-01-17.html[/url]

[Mobo]

I have also come acroos this program using the term Hijackthis in their promo to get users to download.

As well as the website http://hijack-this.net/ , clearly using the merits of another program to have users download thier product mistakenly.