Anti Spyware blows out every personal setting in XP

[J. Kenney]

Be careful, after installing this beta the second reboot
resulted in XP acting like a new install. It lost all my
desktop settings, asked which program I wanted to control
my wireless network adapter, etc. It had also deleted
Ad-Watch. Do not - I repeat - do not install without a
backup first, or at least create a restore point. You are
much better off with Ad-Aware, Spy Bot Search & Destroy and
Spyware Blaster, all of which are freeware. It did remove
the DSO Exploit in the registry before wiping everything
else out, however.

 

[Mikie]

Has anyone really experienced anything positive about this
product? All I'm reading is problems... I currently use
spybot, spywareblaster, pestpatrol, Ad-Aware and they all
work well in concert and by themselves. I see no reason
to stomp all over the cleanup crew that already have if
this MS solution really sucks ...

 

[Bullwinkle. J. Moose]

It's a beta. If you have not run betas before and expect it to work
perfectly stay away and wait for the final release.

In any case stay with your main tools as you list them.

Good luck.

 

[John]

I've got it installed on three different platforms without any problems -
but I wasn't infested or owned so your results may vary.

Plus: Keep in mind that millions of copies have been installed and the
results are actually quite good if you consider what you see here. You will
see mostly problems in this environment but most of them are fitting into
one of three or four groups. Not bad I think.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

If you look, there are a few folk posting paeans of praise for the product
here. Not many, but a few.

That's as expected, I think. If you install the product, and it just works,
and you don't worry about it, there's little reason to go to the trouble of
finding these groups and reading or writing about your experience.

This is true of most product support newsgroups--the folks you find in the
groups are the ones having trouble with the product.

This product has been downloaded 6.8 million times, by the most recent stats
I've read. A pretty small fraction of those folks are posting here--there
are less than 16000 posts in these groups by my count, so that's what--.2%
of the users?

The vast majority of installs I've done of Microsoft Antispyware have been
entirely uneventful. It works, little or nothing is found, I never hear
from the users of those workstations, except to comment on the definition
update notices.

Reading beta newsgroups is not for the faint of heart, nor is it a good way
to get a picture of what your own experience of a given product is likely to
be. It is a good way to see what the worst-case scenarios are, though.

 

[Spider]

Not to mention that about 20 percent of the 2 percent are helpers and/or
techs researching.

--


Spider
http://web.tampabay.rr.com/spider1
http://spider1.blogspot.com/

 

[Bill Sanderson]

I shudder to think what percent of the posts here are mine.

 

[John]

16% Bill - just caclulated it as of 0800 EST 17 Feb 05

 

[Guest]

Hi,

I suggest you use Linux.

 

[Bill Sanderson]

Nuts - gotta work at getting that up a bit!
(just kidding!)

 

[Ron Chamberlin]

John,
He's still mourning the Eagles loss in Florida. He'll recover and get those
numbers up tho!

Ron Chamberlin
MS-MVP