PC Tools Spyware Doctor 5.0

Spyware Doctor 5.0 looks remarkably similar to version 4. Probe a little deeper, however, and the feature set has been noticeably extended.

Spyware Doctor is now able to integrate with other PC Tools products. With this release, there's an optional upgrade to the PC Tools antivirus engine, so that incoming e-mails are checked for spyware and viruses, while the scanner looks for both sorts of malware.

One criticism concerning updates has been addressed. Previously, updates had to be manually initiated, but now it's possible to set up automatic "silent" updates that require no user intervention. This means updates are incremental and download faster.

As before, Spyware Doctor's protection breaks down into two components: an on-demand scanner and a number of real-time monitors.

File scanning has been accelerated thanks to its patent-pending spider-scanning technology. A complete Intelli-scan of 3.5GB of data took just three minutes on our ageing notebook.

At the heart of version 5.0 is OnGuard Protection, which comprises a range of tasked guards: Browser, File, Keylogger, Network, Popup Blocker, Process, Site and Startup.

Each one can be disabled and you can only configure exclusions for Web sites or files. This will prevent new programs initiating automatically with your PC, block programs that collect your keyboard input, stop known malicious programs running and prevent access to malicious sites. The Process Guard can even kill kernel-level spyware processes.