Greetings - I've used Spysweeper WITHOUT Antivirus for several years. For antivirus protection I use a different product. I do NOT like or want to use one program for all my security ! I believe in the old proverbial phrase, "Don't keep all your eggs in one basket".
Today, Spysweeper checked for updates and it said an update was available, so I accepted it. BAD IDEA, because now Webroot Spysweeper INCLUDES antivirus protection (SecureAnywhere). It is not a good idea to have multiple antivirus products running on the same PC. I removed Webroot and reinstalled Spysweeper. Unfortunately the antivirus part is included. HOW do I get JUST Spysweeper Antispyware WITHOUT the antivirus protection of SecureAnywhere? (Or do I have to forget about using Webroot's Spysweeper in the future entirely?)
Solved
Spysweeper update includes more than what I want
Best answer by Kit
I'm very sorry to hear that. I assume, hopefully correctly, that you contacted our support crew regarding the two laptops that have had trouble. From the support standpoint, SecureAnywhere has been tremendously successful, reducing the volume of problems compared to SpySweeper by a tremendous amount, so those two laptops are outliers. Two things that I can think of causing the symptoms you describe are pre-existing problems with the machines (which we see in about 3/10,000 installs and are constantly working to reduce the impact of) or not allowing the initial scan to complete (such as a person who hooks it up to the internet to install, gets impatient with the fact that the first scan will take about five minutes, and shuts it down.)@ wrote:
WSA "might" be the cats pajamas, but killing off vanilla spysweeper is a mistake. The last two laptops i have seen upgraded to WSA became raging doorstops and could only be resurected from a Zombie existance by complete removal of webroot. I would have prefered that we the user had the option to stay or return to "vanilla" Spysweeper. I have been recommending Spysweeper to my clients for years but that may have to stop now.
Living in the very rural desert south west, not everyone has access to high speed internet, many folks here are still on dialup access providers so anything "web based" is usally a problem
Sorry but local experience will have to outweigh salesmans promises for now. I wish we were not being left behind by the discontinuation of vanilla Spysweeper but i think when it goes away or as subscriptions run out, If nothing changes to improve the situation as I see it, I think i'll be moving my clients to a subscription to Malwarebytes - AntiMalware.:mansad:
Its been a good ride till now..
Vince
P.S. I'll never understand this facination with "the Cloud".. Sure every cloud has a silver lining, but silver tarnishes and its not a good idea to stand out in the rain.. I guess when everything is "Cloud based" I may, by necessity, become a Luddite :(
On the line of cloud stuff:
SpySweeper Install requires several tens of megabytes worth of definition downloads to install and may end up downloading 1-2MB worth of definitions per day, however can only do so if connected to the internet when it tries. If the dial up connection is not there for update attempts for too long, the definitions become out of date and need to do a full update instead of an incremental, plus there is little to no protection against anything that comes out while the definitions are not updating. This same issue will apply to the Antivirus you have running with SpySweeper (you do have an AntiVirus running alongside SpySweeper, I hope, because SS itself is NOT a full Antivirus and will not catch anything but spyware. If you don't, that can be the cause for the problems you are experiencing. The AV program will also need to download its own however many megabytes of definition data.)
By comparison, SecureAnywhere uses 200-600k a day in cloud communication because it only needs to handle things that it sees, not everything that it could possibly see that is bad. It also will hold onto this request data indefinitely without negative side effect if no network connection is available, though it is a good idea to connect at least once or twice a day. The total network volume required per day is oftentimes a tenth or less of that compared to SpySweeper with other AV programs.
Considering my history is in support, when I can look at their reports and see a huge and constant decrease in problem issues despite a constant and steady increase in people using SecureAnywhere, I can tell you it's just plain impressive. So anything turning PCs into Doorstops is completely away from the norm.
The only real downside is that it is important to "play by the rules", so to speak. If the agent says "Don't cancel this scan! It's a really bad idea!" then seriously, it really is a really, really bad idea. We won't stop you from doing it other than with that message, but then again there is nothing but a fence and a sign keeping a guy from going and harassing the two-ton bull in pasture, and that's a really, really bad idea too.
Even MBAM requires several megabytes of definition downloads on a regular basis to operate properly. Is it better to say "Sorry, you have to have your dial up on and downloading this 3 MB update at 4k/s (that'll be over 12 minutes) when MBAM wants it to" versus two minutes of traffic? "The Cloud" simply means that the servers on the company's side do the heavy lifting so that older computers or smaller network connections don't have to.
Please get in touch with us in the event you have any problems. We're real people, based in the US (though we have support crew in Europe and Australia too), we really do answer the phone, and when there is a real issue, we actually fix it, even if it is something that goes to development. And yes, we fix "small" problems too.. There is an out of date keyboard driver that was in use by a handful customers. It caused keyboard problems when installed alongside us. A small number of people out of millions using the agent is not that many, however the issue was fixed by our action within two weeks, even though it could be fixed by simply updating the keyboard drivers.
So let us know. What you did, what happened that you didn't expect, or what didn't happen that you did expect. You and your clients shouldn't be prevented from using SecureAnywhere just because of old technology on that side. Like I said, all "The Cloud" means is that we see things everywhere in realtime and we do the heavy lifting for you.
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