By James Remar.

There are different types of anti-spyware tools available over the internet but the two things common to most of the top products is that they will effectively remove spyware from your system and they offer the option of comprehensive scanning.

Some of the top anti-spyware tools include XoftSpySE, NoAdware, spywarebot, anti-spywarebot, spyware nuker, spynomore and PAL Spyware Remover. Once you have downloaded any of these anti-spyware tools, install them and get ready for scanning your computer. It is always recommended to scan all the disk drives, the boot sector and even the external drives just to be on the safer side. But if you want to scan anything specific like a particular folder or just USB drive then that is also possible.

Let’s look at an example to understand how you can conduct a comprehensive spyware scan on your computer. If you have installed an anti-spyware tool like XoftSpySE then you need to do the following to scan your PC.

• Click to Open XoftSpySE from the start menu or the desktop
• Once you click on the Start button, you will get various options like scan your entire system, search for suspicious files in cookies, and programs etc. If you are using the anti-spyware tool for the first time then you need to initiate a full computer scan or a comprehensive scan for spyware.
• Once the anti-spyware tool finishes scanning, it will show you a list of spyware, adware, malicious code, malware etc. All or any suspicious object will be shown in your anti-spyware scanning results window.
• The all you need to do is click on the object to highlight it and then press the remove button. If there are multiple objects then you can highlight all and press remove.

There are two objectives of comprehensive scanning. The first objective is to identify any and all spyware, keylogger, malware, adware and Trojans. The second objective is to delete them. Most of the top anti-spyware tools will automatically look for updates on a daily basis so that it can add the information to their database. The primary reason behind this is to make comprehensive scanning effective.

• Comprehensive scanning will include the following:
• The anti-spyware tool will check all the disc drives including the boot sector
• It will scan the external drives like USB or external hard drive
• It will scan for browser hijackers
• It will scan windows registry because spyware tend to change, modify or remove the executable codes embedded in the registry values.
• It will also scan any active processes including your web browser.
• The anti-spyware tools will scan all your host files that support the Internet connectivity on your computer.
• It will initiate scanning of system folders that contain all the important files related to the Windows operating system or any other OS.

To make the comprehensive scan effective, scheduling of your anti-spyware scanning process is recommended. You can schedule at a specific time everyday or schedule it according to your convenience like a weekly scan, fortnightly scan or even a monthly scan