Anti-spyware anesthetises your OS before going to work

AS SPAM reaches record levels and more and more operating system exploits are discovered every week the threat of spyware has become greater than ever.

No longer relegated to the realms of annoying pop-ups as in the days of Gator, spyware is now a more insidious beast, lurking deep within your system relaying who knows what information back to people who will bend it to their nefarious will, hackers, phishers and worst of all marketing companies.

As security systems have become more robust and smarter at detecting and removing these malicious little bastards, so the bastards have dug deeper and found their way into systems files and other places that your security is not allowed to go.

Enter PC Tools' new spyware killer, AOSS (alternate operating system scanner). As the name suggests this program boots into a different OS, namely a modified version of Linux, to allow the scanner run independently of Windows. This serves the purpose of being able to access areas that the Vole normally doesn't allow us to tread.

PC Tools have been around for ages helping us clean up our machines, both from outside influences as well as the flotsam and jetsam created by general usage, with popular tools such as Registry Mechanic, Privacy Guardian and Spyware Doctor.

AOSS is still in development, and PC Tools have yet to announce a release date, but the INQ was a beta copy and we got to give it a spin.

The program boots from the CD, which could be a small stumbling block if your PC's boot order is hard drive then CD drive, but a quick change in the BIOS soon sets this right. The program boots really fast, and you are promptly asked to agree to offer your first born to PC Tools as a sacrifice for this product, at least we assume it says that as we never bother to read license agreements.

The user then selects the drives and partitions they want to scan and at this point something very cunning happens, you are presented with the option of obtaining any database updates from a USB flash disk. So you're not stuck with an outdated version of the program and you're not forced to burn a new CD every time the database is updated. You simply stick the new information onto a flash drive and have the program update from that.

On a fairly well-specced notebook with a 40GB partition that is about half full the scan took about 30 mins. That may seem like a long time to some, but this not the type of scan you should be running daily, rather this a maintenance scan that should only be run periodically or when you suspect things have gone pear shaped. The other thing to remember that this is a beta version, meaning there is probably still some optimisation that can be done.

In Short
This is an excellent idea that has the potential to save a lot of PCs from having to be formatted and re-installed. This will save a lot of time, effort and data for a fair number of people who find their systems have become riddled with nasties and should become part of the standard set of tools available to any computer techie. ?