I know it's always tempting to find a best free anti-spyware program without the need to pay for any subscription or renewal key. But just like we prefer Windows (which is not free at all), after carefully studying the rather limited number of free anti-spyware programs we come to the conclusion that it's a hard task to choose something worth bearing the attribute "best".

There reason is pretty unobvious, but easily understandable. Spyware threats are prevalent in the number of malware infections these days. If computer viruses are simply annoying mainly because of their name, then spyware attacks very often lead to unrecoverable systems, which end in full reformat and Windows reinstall. Removing spyware infections easily takes hours spent on continuous search for free removal tools, free online virus/spyware scanners, frequent reboots and cursing malware coders for their activity.

That's the reason why it is best to prevent spyware intrusion than fight the invaders, at the cost of time, sweat and nerve. The typical prevention feature of anti spyware programs is called "real-time monitoring". A special anti-spyware module is loaded into the memory and sits their watching the running processes. The very few free anti-spyware programs I'm aware of (they can be counted by fingers of a single hand) are doing this on the basis of spyware definitions supplied in the database by the software manufacturer.

However, the approach of comparing the processes running in the system memory against the malware signatures is obsolete. Spyware is changing at unprecedented pace and the way it invaded PC's a year or two ago is no longer used by malware coders. Instead, modern spyware is diversified to the degree where conventional malware detection methods fail. You may have an antivirus and anti-spyware icon blinking happily in the notification area signaling about system safety, but the spyware can already be doing its nasty things inside.

The latest trends in the way scam extortion and rogue security programs are distributed on the Web clearly show that a real-time protection mechanism is no longer an effective approach to stopping the spyware at the gates.

There's a need to develop a whole new technology to detect the spyware on-the-fly and block it at the very entry to the system. Unfortunately, security software companies controlling the market of anti-spyware programs still do nothing to adapt their software to the needs of customers. That's nonsense: industry leaders choose to rest on laurels instead of enhancing the algorithms of their software.

Because best free anti-spyware is usually made by same companies who offer paid anti-spyware protection, it is easy to draw the conclusion that their free programs would not have the adequate anti-spyware protection as well. And, of course, they don't. Hence the reason the best free anti-spyware programs are vulnerable in respect to an ever rising amount of type of new malware.

In fact, best free anti-spyware is only suitable for on-demand scans. Such anti-spyware products are updatable in a couple of mouse-clicks, but their resident monitoring (if present) leaves much to be desired.

That's why I conclude that best free anti-spyware is simply a non-existent product in reality. Or, it is a heavily exploited marketing term to attract visitors to websites which claim to be offering some "best free anti-spyware", but never do it. At best, they offer what's known as "free scan" or "free download", which as you might guess, has nothing to do with free anti-spyware, not speaking about best free anti-spyware.

As of now, only few young and ambitious competitors on the market of anti-spyware solutions found the courage to respond to the new types of malware flooding the Internet, and released products featuring not just old-fashioned real-time protection with a database of malware definitions. The manufacturers went ahead of the competition and developed the technology allowing for detection of unknown spyware! Special algorithms analyze the behavior of system processes and file activity to be able to recognize the potentially harmful spyware before it is executed.

Hence the reason why you simply cannot find best free anti-spyware with such enhancements yet. However, some of these advanced software companies (namely a-squared, Malwarebyte's and SUPERAntiSpyware) offer either full-featured trial versions of their programs, or editions without real-time scan option. These are the very best free anti-spyware programs for on-demand scan.

Next: Best Antispyware