December 12, 2005
Product Review: CounterSpy 1.5
Richard Kuper
The Kuper Report
http://TheKuperReport.com
CounterSpy is an anti-spyware product from Sunbelt Software (http://www.sunbelt-software.com/). CounterSpy is $19.95 per machine. The price includes a one year subscription with updates, upgrades and US-based technical support. According to the website, it is the only anti-spyware product that gets regular spyware threat database updates from three sources: Sunbelt's own Spyware Research Team, CounterSpy users that are a member of their ThreatNet Community, and from Microsoft's spyware research group.
The computer on which this software was installed and tested is running Windows XP-Home and has both administrator and non-administrator ids. For safe computing, all work other than installation of software is done from non-administrator ids.
The product installed without incident, and it was easy, from the administrator id, to check for updates. The product was set up to do automatic updates. Running a scan of the hard disk (currently contains 15.2G of data) took half an hour.
As stated above, for safe computing, all work other than installation of software is done from non-administrator ids. This proved to be problematic for CounterSpy. It was never able to download the latest updates from non-admininstrator ids. Initially this was thought to be a connection problem, but it soon became apparent that the product is set up to only allow automatic updates to work when logged in as an administrator. This is not a problem I have had with other anti-spyware products from other vendors. The only way to download the updates is to log into the administrator id. This makes this product less usable on a properly set up pc. Further, downloading the updates did not then prompt the installation of those updates.
CounterSpy seems to be somewhat counter-intuitive to the concept of preventing unauthorized products and access to one's pc, by requiring the user to be logged in as an administrator in order to properly be able to use the product.
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R.L. Kuper, Inc. - Management Consulting
The Kuper Report
http://TheKuperReport.com
CounterSpy is an anti-spyware product from Sunbelt Software (http://www.sunbelt-software.com/). CounterSpy is $19.95 per machine. The price includes a one year subscription with updates, upgrades and US-based technical support. According to the website, it is the only anti-spyware product that gets regular spyware threat database updates from three sources: Sunbelt's own Spyware Research Team, CounterSpy users that are a member of their ThreatNet Community, and from Microsoft's spyware research group.
The computer on which this software was installed and tested is running Windows XP-Home and has both administrator and non-administrator ids. For safe computing, all work other than installation of software is done from non-administrator ids.
The product installed without incident, and it was easy, from the administrator id, to check for updates. The product was set up to do automatic updates. Running a scan of the hard disk (currently contains 15.2G of data) took half an hour.
As stated above, for safe computing, all work other than installation of software is done from non-administrator ids. This proved to be problematic for CounterSpy. It was never able to download the latest updates from non-admininstrator ids. Initially this was thought to be a connection problem, but it soon became apparent that the product is set up to only allow automatic updates to work when logged in as an administrator. This is not a problem I have had with other anti-spyware products from other vendors. The only way to download the updates is to log into the administrator id. This makes this product less usable on a properly set up pc. Further, downloading the updates did not then prompt the installation of those updates.
CounterSpy seems to be somewhat counter-intuitive to the concept of preventing unauthorized products and access to one's pc, by requiring the user to be logged in as an administrator in order to properly be able to use the product.
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