Then I’ll kindly ask you to remember that the next time your PC is slowing down and crashing from being overloaded with spyware, while us Mac users are merrily chuggin’ along. 
I downloaded SpyCop a while back and found …
That’s right, zero. Hmmm, guess I’m managing OK. Of course, I have my PC seriously locked down. Still, I think I’ll try Adaware since previous posters note it sometimes finds things SpyCop has missed.
I just got Ad Aware 6 yesterday. I scanned and it said that I had something like 370 “suspicious programs”. All deleted now, thank god, my computer is slow enough without spyware on it too !
Just a reminder, guys & gals – don’t forget to get the updates before running an AdAware scan. It’s simple, quick and the update list changes frequently.
Hey guys, I hope you don’t mind me hijacking my own thread but – does Adaware scan for NETSCAPE cookies?? I don’t use IE anymore and I’m getting a little suspicious that I’ve got some “spyware” cookies that Adaware isn’t finding. (Just scanned and found zero suspicious items.)
Nope, it doesn’t. Nor any other browser’s cookies except Internet Explorer. (To be fair, there’s some good technical reason for this. IE stores each cookie as a single file that can be deleted with little harm. Netscape stores all its cookies as one text file that it doesn’t really like other programs messing with. The up side to Netscape’s tactic is that it takes far less hard drive space.)
Thanks Toddly, never thought to try that. Doh! Worth doing even with the usual 10 or so data mining culprits I find on every scan.
Aw, crap. Well…the advantages of Netscrape 7.0 over Internet Exploder are so vast, that I guess it’s worth a few tiny ants crawling all over my cookies. I generally delete all my cookies en masse every few months anyway, since the file does grow too large eventually. Just hope I can remember all my passwords!
I limit the cookies that can be saved on my computer when using IE. It seems to be okay except that I still have some spyware lurking in my computer since I get an annoying popup every once in a while.
The particular option (in case some of you are wondering) that I used for the cookie management is under Tools > Internet Options > Privacy > Advanced and I checked the “Override automatic cookie handling” so that every time I visit a site that requests a cookie, I can actively enable or disable their cookie storage.
This gets to be a hassle at first but after a while of visiting the same sites, I don’t have to go through that mess as much.
I just recently ran Adaware on a few of my PC using friends computers (I am one of those sad little virus-and-spyware-free Mac using people 
) and on their comp’s I netted:
First, a 271, then on another computer, 704, and, finally, a 1024.
Needless to say, Not many of my friends were actually aware of the fact spyware exists. Kazaa, Gator, and a few other programs are notorious for including spyware as a part of their installation, and in the case of Kazaa, removing the spyware will render the program dead. This can be sidestepped by downloading Kazaa Lite.