Hey.

Is Windows Defender a good anti-spyware.

In your response please don't judge it on it's real time protection.

All I care about is the scanning. Is the scanning excellent/good/ok/poor/complete and utter effluence?

I don't like anything except an Anti-virus when it comes to real-time protection. I have Ad-aware 2007 and BitDefender and those two are the only things with real time protection that I'll tolerate.

The reason being is that you can only have one anti-virus which means on Startup it won't be too slowed down because you're only adding one anti-virus. But since you can have multiple anti-spyware applications it really annoys me when they ALL want to start on startup and they ALL want to have realtime protection 24/7. Spybot S&D and SpywareDoctor are examples.

But the most notorious for this is SpywareBlaster. It ONLY offers real-time protection. Everyone was praising how it was the best and then I went and downloaded it and it didn't even have a scan option. Plus it doesn't seem to be compatible with Vista. It won't start on startup even though it's supposed to be offering real-time protection and when you minimize it it won't go to the system tray even though it says it will.

Anyway rant over.

So is Windows Defender good? If it isn't what are some good alternatives which do scans and you can turn the realtime protection off on?

Many thanks in advance.

I used it for a while, slows down your computer a bit but it seems ok

I used it for a while, thought it was doing a good enough job. I then put avg antispyware on my pc and it found over 100 threats including 3 serious ones so I think Windows Defender is utter rubbish and have voted accordingly.

Really? Wow that's bad. Better get AVG anti-spyware then.

They say you should use several anti-spyware things. Do you guys use only one or do you have many. If so do you have a list. As I said SpywareBlaster doesn't seem to work on Vista and my license for SpywareDoctor seems to have expired. But I'm open to any other suggestions.

Maybe I'll get SpyBot S&D. If Windows Defender is that ineffectual I'll need two.

Didou why did you edit my last post...?

Anyway I got AVG anti-spyware and turned off its Resident Shield. I deleted it's registry entry for startup. God I hate when these things want to clog my startup. Is there even an option to turn it off?