Featured Freeware: Advanced System Protector Personal

This spyware remover looks good and offers security fundamentals, but its efficacy is hard to judge on a clean or already-secure system. Advanced System Protector aims to rid your machine of spyware and malicious software, and it's generally a pretty thing to watch. The interface has a classy bar of tabs across the top, although the central pane feels a bit cluttered by deviating from the design scheme with a big, green Start Scan Now button.

Below that, there are three choices for the type of scan: Quick, Deep, and Custom. The Quick scan took about 23 minutes, while the Custom scan lets you opt out of Cookies, Memory, Registry, and Files and Folders, or select specific folders and files to toss in the pot. Advanced System Protector is sensitive enough to pick up tracking cookies, although there didn't seem to be a method for fine-tuning that. The scheduler was surprisingly impressive, allowing for scans daily, once, and variations in-between. You can configure the program to run at start-up, to update definition files automatically, and create a whitelist of files to never scan.

However, Advanced System Protector lacks an integrated antivirus component, which more and more solo malicious software battlers are now building in from the get-go. The real-time shields components are also kept behind a deadbolt unless you upgrade to the paid version. Overall, program runs well for what it can do and shouldn't be hard to use.