Hardly anyone several years ago could foresee that the importance of antivirus software as the core component of PC security would drop considerably. The industry-leading PC security software manufacturers shared the rapidly growing market with very few competitors who had the courage to develop antispyware software. Lavasoft Ad-aware pioneered the antispyware protection, bringing an additional level of security to all Windows-based PC's worldwide. The company made a wise marketing step by offering a free version of its antispyware software, thought lacking real-time protection, but featuring same scanning power and spyware removal efficiency as commercial editions of Ad-aware.

But times have changed greatly, and today PC users are afraid not that much of viruses, but rather of identity theft and phishing scams. Still, while it's common to have some popular antivirus bundle installed (especially on pre-built computers), antispyware software is offered by PC assembling companies as an option. The choice of antispyware programs is scarce as well, and savvy customers rarely can order the antispyware protection they want. Most computers are sold with some common antispyware module as part of antivirus suites.

Unfortunately, antivirus manufacturers usually (with a couple of exceptions) offer comparatively weak – in terms of detection rates - antispyware software. Either they do not consider the antispyware software important enough to work on its scanning algorithms, or believe in the power of antivirus engines enhanced with heuristics modules.

No matter what the reasons are, if you look at tests of antispyware software conducted by reputable Internet magazines in their own labs, you'll not be able to help but notice that the leaders in antivirus market perform miserably in antispyware detection and protection.

This is why so many software makers got involved in creating antispyware solutions. Currently there are more antispyware products than antivirus tools on the market! But not all of them are equally good at fighting spyware. Many programs are badly coded, have poor detection rates, rarely updated, and often lack any support whatsoever.

In fact the market of antispyware software has about a dozen of products consistently featuring goof performance. Some companies buy competitors to get access to patented algorithms. The competitions is very high, providing the growing demand for reliable antispyware software.

Except for less important features, the following are to be present in any antispyware program you consider for on-going protection:

•        It should be able to detect, remove and prevent from getting into the system the following types of malware: trojans, worms, adware, spyware, dialers, rogue programs, rootkits;

•        Frequent (preferable daily) automatic updates of malware definitions;

•        Scheduled scans;

•        Ability to work in Windows Safe Mode;

•        Real-time protection with recognition of "unknown" types of malware.

These 5 points are crucial to ensure the best antispyware protection possible, that's why if you're looking for antispyware software, make sure the features are implemented by the manufacturer.

Some people find it necessary for the antispyware software to have a fast scan. But in real world fast scan rarely equals to thorough scan, which is way more important. Because what antispyware users want is to remove the malware, whether it takes 15 minutes to scan or half a hour.

I advise that you look closely at the last point in the list above. While most antispyware software programs rely solely on available definitions of malware to be able to detect the instances of infection, this type of real-time protections is quickly getting obsolete. New threats appear hourly, and no company is able to encompass the whole variety of them to work out definitions for all of the malware patterns. That's why a really good antispyware software has a powerful heuristics engine and features ability to identify "unknown" malware on-the-fly by monitoring the activity of system processes closely.

Currently these advanced features are available only in a handful of antispyware software solutions, some of them being: Malwarebyte's Anti-malware, a-squared anti-malware and SUPERAntiSpyware.

Next: Free Antispyware Software