Patrick Douglas Crispen
TOURBUS Volume 9, Number 49 -- 30 May 2004
New Version of Spybot Search & Destroy
Audience: All PC users running older versions of Spybot
-------------------------------------------------------
Several of your fellow passengers asked me to announce that a new
version of Spybot Search & Destroy is now available. Spybot Search &
Destroy is one of the two, free spyware removal tools that I *HIGHLY*
recommend for PC users. The other is LavaSoft's Ad-Aware 6. In fact,
I routinely scan my PC with Ad-Aware and then with Spybot Search &
Destroy just to be extra careful/paranoid.
Now for the bad news: If you installed Spybot Search & Destroy any
time prior to last Monday, your version is no longer supported. No
more application updates, no more host file updates, no more detection
updates. Nothing. Your version of Spybot has been abandoned in place.
How can you tell what version of Spybot you're running? Just open the
program and then go to Help > About. [You can also right-click on
your SpybotSD.exe file, choose Properties, and click on the Version
tab.] If you're running version 1.2 or earlier, you need to upgrade
to the latest version, version 1.3.
It gets worse. Rumor has it there isn't an easy way to upgrade to the
latest version of Spybot Search & Destroy short of uninstalling your
old version and then downloading and installing the new version. So,
if you have Spybot Search & Destroy and want to upgrade to version 1.3,
1. Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel [or Start > Control
Panel in XP]
2. Double-click on Add/Remove Programs
3. Click on Spybot in the list of currently installed programs
4. Click on the Remove button
Once you uninstall the old version of Spybot Search & Destroy, you
need to download and install the new version. Fortunately, there are
dozens of mirror sites around the world from which you can download
Spybot Search & Destroy 1.3. Fred Langa recently recommended
http://majorgeeks.com/download2471.html
and that's good enough for me. Click on a download site at the top of
the page [look for the flags]. This should automatically download
spybotSD13.exe to your computer. The file is 4.15 Mb in size, so
it'll probably take a little over 10 minutes to download over the
fastest dial-up connection. As I am fond of saying [and often
forgetting when standing in line at Disneyland], patience is a virtue.
The rest of the process is self-explanatory, but if you'd like to see
a step-by-step tutorial of how to install and use Spybot Search &
Destroy, just head on over to
http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=tutorial