Features
Aside from antivirus protection, Spy Sweeper continues to provide first-class antispyware protection. Webroot uses protective shields to protect your hard drive, blocking spyware and adware as it attempts to download. Within the Spy Sweeper Sweep section there are three options. Full Sweep scans all the files on your computer's attached drives. Quick Sweep offers a fast and light pass of your main drive system. Custom Sweep allows you to select individual drives or folders or exclude extensions.
But we found that deep scans for rootkits, pernicious little malware packages that hide deep within the system kernel, are now optional. Webroot says that its advanced heuristic rootkit protection can be time (and possibly resource) intensive, so Spy Sweeper 5.2 makes it an optional feature. With traditional antivirus packages, full rootkit protection, when offered, is enabled by default.
As previously mentioned, we also found aspects of traditional antivirus technology missing. Presently, Webroot includes only the On Demand Sophos virus inspection engine to check for and remove file infections. Missing is the Realtime Sophos virus engine that looks for active infections from e-mail, IM, and other vectors. Webroot says that functionality will come later, but it's a tad misleading to suggest that Spy Sweeper 5.2 with Antivirus is a complete antivirus solution.
Performance
In addition to adding the antivirus engine, it appears Webroot has made significant code tweaks under the hood to improve overall performance. In some cases they elected to make some scans optional. Thus, we found that Spy Sweeper 5.2 used fewer system resources while scanning than Spy Sweeper 5.
Check back in December to see how Spy Sweeper ranks among other antispyware apps at removing active spyware threats.
As for Spy Sweeper's reputation for software conflicts, that's improved as well. We installed Spy Sweeper 5.2 with ZoneAlarm Security Suite 6.7.5 on the same test machine and experienced no difficulties or conflicts, even with two antivirus engines present. That's because the antivirus engine in Spy Sweeper is passive, invoked only when actively scanning your PC. In general, you should never have two antivirus applications running on the same PC.
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