PestPatrol - part II

by Andrew Cooper

Scanning the whole of my disk C (11.9GB of used space) took about 4 minutes on my 1.6 GHz Pentium 4. Recently I tested Anti-Trojan software so I was confident I had no Trojans, but I never used an anti-spyware so was interested if PP would find something.

And, surprisingly it did!



Several webHancer versions and Window Media Player exploits were found on my hard drive! The report provides a very comprehensive analysis of each pest found. For background info on each pest you can visit a web page containing a full description. Very useful!

Now for a closer look at the Options menu. Anything interesting or unique? Clicking the Options tab opens the menu with some intriguing sub-tabs.

The user can specify in detail exactly where to scan for pests, what pests to search for, what files should be excluded from the scan, automatic scan options, such as scanning on boot up, etc.

The most interesting step is setting what pests to search for. The list of pests is gigantic; very impressive for such a tiny program.

The final tab worthy of attention is "Advanced", the last but not least feature to make you love PP:



The two most useful features of this tab are Running Processes and Startup Files. The first let you see the currently running processes and the second enables you to check what applications are run during Windows' startup. Unfortunately there are no options to terminate a running process or to remove an application from the Startup list.

Finally, there are the sub-tabs Analyze a File and Cookies.

With Analyze a File you can get the specifics of any file on your system. The report includes common info like file size and type, as well as more advanced data like MD5 strings. However, most home users will probably ignore this feature.

The Cookies sub-tab, not surprisingly, allows you to view all the cookies on your hard-drive. You can delete any cookie, but you cannot block it on the fly during web surfing.

Verdict



PestPatrol is definitely an application you will love to use. However, some people-especially rookies-may have some problems becoming familiar with its interface. On the other hand, once you're used to it, I think you'll like it. The program is more than an ordinary anti-Trojan application. It's more a solution to catch all kinds of pests that your anti-virus software fails to detect. If you're looking for another tool to add to your anti-virus and firewall utilities, I recommend that you consider PestPatrol.

Developer's web site: http://www.pestpatrol.com/

Back to Part I