Webroot Spy Sweeper Internet Essentials Suite

Rating:
Summary: I've only used 2 parts
Review: The Spy Sweeper and Window Washer portions seem pretty good. You can fine-tune them to do or not do particular things, and can schedule tasks to occur at specific times.

The basic function of Window Washer is to remove the "obvious" lists of file names and user names that get stored by various programs, such as the "Recently Opened" list, the history list of URL's in a browser, as well as the obscure portions Windows itself, such in error message logs, temp files, and other locations. There are about 30 spots it can clean for you, including the "slack" space in clusters. "Slack" is the left-over portion of a previous file that has been over-written. For true paranoics, there is an optional "bleach" cycle that will overwrite the slack up to 39 times.

It also cleans out cookies, but you can have it leave specific ones you really need.

Spy Sweeper functions like an anti-virus program and looks for ad-ware, key-stroke, and other "spy" type files on your computer. It is very customizable.

If you have Window Washer or Spy Sweeper do "everything", expect it to take a pretty long time - perhaps you'll want to run it overnight...

As IE offers anti-pop up and anti-spam features, I have not installed those two portions of the software, but they might prove useful to some people.