Noadware’s tool is a little unusual in that, while you can try it free, it doesn’t do anything other than tell you how horribly infested your PC is. To remove the spyware, you have to hand over your credit card. You can either consider that a
handy way to avoid wasting money or a marketing method called ‘gun to the head-ware’.

Installation is fairly straightforward, and it was one of the quickest at scanning. It produced a comprehensive-looking list of infections – though that did include one program, identified as Kazaa, that’s never been anywhere near our test PC.

One annoyance we found was that the default options seemed to err too much on the open side, allowing your home page to be hijacked, for instance. We’d rather see the system locked down so you can tailor it yourself, but you have to turn on IE and ActiveX protection yourself – something that should be the default if good protection is to be offered.

Similarly, an automatic scan at start-up – when many infections try to re-establish themselves – wasn’t enabled by default. More positively, Noadware made backups before removing files.

As with most of the other applications, however, removal was far from perfect. While our home page was no longer hijacked, we still had unwanted toolbars, and pop-ups in Internet Explorer, and the software continued to report instances of applications it said it had removed.