Review: PC Tools Spyware Doctor With Antivirus 6

Released just before Symantec agreed to acquire PC Tools, the latest version of Spyware Doctor aims to protect you and up to three of your PCs from spyware and virus attacks.

The software offers manual scanning that gives you a choice of targeting critical system resources or entire drives, with a custom mode available to help you select between the range of scanners available.

These scanners are also used for real-time protection through PC Tool’s Intelliguard suite, which is designed to shield against threats such as keyloggers, email attacks, malicious processes and more.

They can be controlled individually, but in most cases you’re simply given the option of choosing to use them or not, so we can see most users sticking to the default settings and letting Spyware Doctor take care of the rest.

This is something it does particularly well, with most threats handled with a minimum of user intervention. There are also some useful extras here that allow you to schedule scans for specific times and create a global action list that allows specific websites or files to be automatically denied or permitted access.

During testing, Spyware Doctor quickly identified and cleaned a variety of threats. We were also impressed by the information provided on the nature of the malicious files, which included a comprehensive history and quarantine details.

Version 6 of Spyware Doctor doesn’t have any additional tools of note, but it has been refined in terms of both the speed and efficiency at which it identifies and removes threats.

We were very impressed by how easy the software was to use, the comprehensive degree of protection and the minimal negative effect on performance. The only real downside is that it’s relatively expensive, although it does come with three licences. Verdict

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