Paretologic’s Xoftspy 4.15 is like Noadware’s offering, in that you can scan to see what you have on your system, but you can’t remove it. And when you find that there are 1,500 things on your PC, you certainly feel like reaching for the credit card so you can pay to remove them.

Scanning is very quick and the 1,500 items found included every cookie and file that every piece of spyware installs on your PC. After rebooting, we were assured there were only seven left to remove, which were duly killed by another scan and clean, and our home page was reset to the value we’d entered into Xoftspy. However, we still had unwanted pop-ups affecting our browsing.

The interface to Xoftspy is straightforward, though the buttons down the side of the screen are a little cramped and dated. We’d also rather see a more useful presentation, grouping potential threats together as in other packages, instead of listing each file separately – it makes the numbers look good, but the actual number of threats detected seemed no better than average, as did the removal performance. We’d like to have seen more details about the things found, but when you have 1,500 of them, it can be quite difficult to be specific