AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5 is available for a 30 day trial download. This is the same product which was previously named EWIDO, before the two companies merged. Prior to the merger, EWIDO was always recommended in many of the forums as a great tool to remove some of the most nasty spywares.

So how does it rank today?

I downloaded a copy of AVG’s anti-spyware program from their site. Note that this software program can only be used with Windows 2000 and XP. The download is about 6.1 MB and AVG’s servers are kind of slow so be patient. But on a good note, the installation is fairly quick and once installed it is ready to go. The one thing that you must do is to get the latest definitions via a update which only took a few minutes.

Before I proceed, I should let you know that I keep my system as clean as possible, so I wasn’t expecting any major ‘bugs’ on my system.

I used the standard default settings to test the anti-spyware program. OK. The system scan is kind of slow. Don’t sit in front of the screen watching it, unless you want to be put to sleep. On a system with approximately 15G of programs and files it took over 35 minutes to do a complete scan.

Once completed the only thing that AVG found were 4 cookie files that it decided was a medium threat. No biggie. Most anti-spyware programs usually will come up with some cookie files just to show that they found something. I’ve never been overly paranoid of cookies and do not consider them a major threat. Others may vary in their opinion and wish to delete the files.

Overall I believe that AVG anti-spyware is a great tool to be used if you get infected and other tools fail. However, to purchase the product is a toss up. It goes back to what most people in the forums do concur on, that no single anti-spyware is going to catch everything. A good line of defense is to use more than one program. I do.

Comments welcome.

[tags]avg, ewido, anti-spyware, windows, [/tags]