Most readers will be aware that in December 2004 Microsoft bought the company that makes the Giant Antispyware scanner.  It was a good choice. Their product, though little known, was one of the best on the market. In my experience, it offered just about the highest level of spyware detection of any single product I’ve tested and additionally had outstanding active protection against new infection. I know because I?d been using the Giant product for two months and was about to write a rave review when Microsoft announced the surprise acquisition.  To its credit, Microsoft has acted quickly and re-released the Giant product under its own moniker in the form of a free beta. As far as I can see, it?s pretty much the same product so I can give it the highest possible recommendation. Some downsides: the active protection will eat up a few percent of your CPU resources, it?s a bit prone to false positives, the beta expires in July and it?s for Win2K and later only. That said, I was more than happy to pay $29.95 for the Giant product so you should be delighted to get essentially the same product for free. However, like all security products, its detection is not perfect so don’t throw away SpyBot or Ad-aware just yet. Tip: the active protection is better than that in SpyBot S&D so you might as well disable that feature in SpyBot and save a few CPU cycles. (6.4MB) http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=321cd7a2-6a57-4c57-a8bd-dbf62eda9671&DisplayLang=en

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