The term Spyware covers a multitude of sins. There are little felonies, like ‘cookies’, which simply supply web sites you visit with your details, so it's possible to log on automatically.

Then there are rampant big sins, like programs that track your every move and report back to sites you’ve never heard of. You can then be lined up for all kinds of spam, or recruited without knowing as part of a ‘zombie network’, to be used for denial-of-service attacks on other web sites.

Spyware Doctor aims to stop the lot, although you can choose which bits of spyware you consider sinful enough to remove. The program uses a variety of different scanning techniques to look at different parts of your system.

We tested Spyware Doctor on a PC which had been running the beta of Windows Defender for the past six months. The PC Tools program picked up 229 ‘infections’, though it turned out over 200 of those were cookies or tracking cookies, which most people consider benign. Even Spyware Defender classifies these as low risk and can be told not to report them.

That left 21 nasties needed to be deleted. The program removed them without complaint and went on to institute OnGuard, its real-time protection system which should stop new spyware attacks.

OnGuard includes a number of different protection applets, including checks on programs that start automatically at switch-on and for programs called keyloggers, which record every key you press. The program doesn’t show you all your auto-start applications, though, so you can stop those you don’t want starting.

Spyware Doctor took around 15 minutes to complete a scan on our test PC, but normally you can schedule this to happen in the background and when you’re not that busy. It does slow down other applications while running, though.

There’s an automatic update system for new spyware signatures, in the same way anti-virus applications are updated.

Spyware Doctor is a comprehensive tool for controlling spyware on your PC. It works efficiently and without interruption to your everyday work, is inexpensive and appears to catch more than Microsoft’s free beta program

Related reviews
Windows Defender, www.microsoft.co.uk
Verdict: A well-presented, anti-spyware software, currently in second beta stage
Price: Free