Aluria Spyware Eliminator 4.0

A slick interface is about the best this has to offer

A luria offers a free tool on its website, but it’s simply for scanning and reporting,
directing you to a web page showing what’s been detected. It listed one of the lowest number of items found in our tests.

Spyware Eliminator is part of a planned suite that will include anti-virus tools and a spam filter, which you can try alongside the anti-spyware. We didn’t test those elements. A common interface allows access to all three components, with a slick
look and automatic updating and scheduling.

Despite the information in the readme, some advanced options weren’t turned on by default. A home page protection option lets you reset your browser home page and should prevent it from being changed, so we used that after our initial scan and remove.

There are settings for broadband and dial-up users, but it’s not clear what the difference is; we used the broadband option. You can also check for Winsock problems, but we’d rather see that done automatically.

Scanning time was fairly slow and, like the free scanner on the Aluria site, it only spotted five items, plus several cookies. Home page protection only seemed to work after a couple of attempts. And, though it’s little consolation if you don’t want any pop-ups, we did have to surf more before intrusive ones appeared.