I stumbled upon this site. Most of the programs listed I already have except
Spyware Doctor and Hitman -- I cannot determine whether the latter is
freeware or not as the site in in Dutch. (A machine translation garbles the
entire site, Ad-aware is translated as At-vinegar!). If anyone knows any
more about Hitman please post.
http://www.hitmanpro.nl/welcome.htm
===
Frank Bohan
¶ I started out with nothing...and I still have most of it left.
Hi,
I've no problems reading it, but maybe it helps that I'm Dutch.
I installed it on quite a lot of machines of people who really don't
know how to handle scanners etc. It's kind of a script downloading other
programs, installing them, updating them and running them, without
asking anything from the user except the first time a few clicks on
'yes' to accept a license.
Never had any problems with it, and the automatic deleting of some items
never gave any problems.
But if you know how to run those programs yourself, there's no need to
use it, I think. But it's really handy for people who react on a message
with 'shall I wipe your harddisk for you' with 'o yes, please, it was
just getting dusty'.
About the program itself:
It runs some freebies.
Beside that there are a few additions from Hitman Pro itself, that
change all the time. They say that it are additions to fill the time
companies need to update their detectionrules when new malware appears.
Spy Sweeper only runs two weeks, it's a trial. They say it's not
implemented to sell it, but that it's good to run it when you run Hitman
Pro the first time, because it's such a good scanner. And a lot of
people start to use this kind of programs when they are infected. Only
problem is that it keeps nagging you to buy it. But when you disable it
from the startups it just dies.
I saw on their site that they added Spyware Doctor too, and probably on
the same conditions as Spy Sweeper. That's new for me.
New for me is also the adding of SuperDAT VirusScan from McAfee, for
what you need some kind of license. I couldn't find out on McAfee's site
what that means, but it looks like you have to pay. I'm not sure, but I
guess that superDAT only scans and doesn't remove anything.
The site from Hitman Pro doesn't give that much information.
Furthermore they have SurfRight. SurfRight protects Internet Explorer.
It gives stronger warnings, and you can't directly run a download from
within Internet Explorer. It also blocks ActiveX downloads etc. To
update Windows you have to use Internet Explorer without SurfRight
(Hitman Pro makes two links: one with and one without SurfRight).
It puts a hosts file, don't know which one, I guess from Spybot Search &
Destroy.
And finally it installs Teatimer, also from Spybot Search & Destroy.
Alltogether it gives pretty good protection, but I guess that if you
know how to practice safe hex you don't need it.
And it's really freeware. It comes from some people from a supportforum
about spyware etc. who probably got a bit sick about every time seeing
the same mistakes.
Because it just runs and installs everything automatically it saves you
a lot of discussions about why they need protection. And it's funny to
see program automatically filling in everything and clicking, so most of
the people like it already for that reason (I see quite a lot of people
who maybe shouldn't be allowed to go on internet
)
In the end it makes a report and, if you want, you send that to Hitman
Pro for their statistics on site.
Peter
