Acronis's Privacy Expert Suite 8.0 offers just about everything you need in a trace remover. This anti-spyware and security suite will help to protect your privacy on your home PC by providing an automated spyware base of updates to protect against spyware parasites, adware, keyloggers and malicious programs. It checks Windows system areas for evidence of user activities and removes traces of work or Internet surfing, blocks pop-up windows and destroys all the data on your old hard disk - and a heck of a lot more. Highly recommended!

Pros: Price; quick, easy to use, and effective; tons of features
Cons: Only supports Windows and Internet Explorer


Identity theft and financial fraud are becoming epidemic. Although these kinds of crimes have been around for ages, the Internet has provided criminals with a wide variety of new, online methods for swindling unsuspecting victims. Spyware is among the most destructive applications that can be introduced to a single desktop or corporate system. It can compromise intellectual property, put corporate databases at risk and even open a company to significant legal culpability.

Acronis' Privacy Expert Suite 8.0 is a proactive software-based method of helping to defeat spyware before it infects your system. The new version includes real time anti-spyware protection, the ability to scan selected folders or disks, the ability to prevent a hidden programme on a computer logging your keystrokes, in addition to support for automatic updates.

The update improves many of the programme's key features and adds several new capabilities, further helping to ensure your information remains private. For instance, there's now the addition of proactively monitoring and shielding of key system resources, as well as the ability to shred files individually or in bulk.

However, there are no anti-virus or firewall utilities included with the suite. Having said that, you can create a bootable floppy disk or CD that will completely wipe an entire partition - a feature unique to this software.

The software is also available for organisations. Designed to protect corporate workstations and servers, Privacy Expert 8.0 Corporate (£15.99 ex. VAT, per client) adds more anti-spyware and data security features. The software offers a centralised management console, the ability to deploy agents to networked PCs, and the ability to run the various anti-spyware and data security applications on remote PCs. Among other features is a spyware shield for proactive protection and automatic spyware definition updates.

Privacy Expert Suite is actually an integrated software suite that provides confidentiality tools to help protect standalone PCs connected to the Internet. From a single, intuitive interface that uses standard Windows XP graphical user interface (GUI) elements, you can clean up your system from spyware threats, block pop-up ads, as well as remove evidence of PC usage through the use of guaranteed data destruction methods. It also helps to increase your PC's performance by cleaning out temporary files.

The suite enables you to remove the evidence of your work in any Windows section. It also allows you to delete Internet cookies, clean up the last visited pages and typed URLs lists, delete auto-complete forms and password lists for Web sites that require authorisation, as well as delete e-mail messages and address book lists in Microsoft's Outlook and Outlook Express.

You can even remove Windows' registry backups that retain evidence of your work, delete temporary files from standard Windows folders, delete custom folders/files from any disks connected to a PC, clean the Windows Recycle Bin, clean the Windows prefetch directory, and destroy securely all data on hard disks or partitions.

The software's main interface is a little intimidating at first, primarily due to the fact that all the tools are presented right in front of you. Thankfully, you can choose between two window layouts. By default, the program offers the standard Category View traditional for Windows XP, in which all functional elements are grouped by their category. If needed, you can switch to the Classic View, which should be more familiar to users of previous versions of Privacy Expert Suite.

Privacy Expert Suite features a built-in scheduler. You can schedule any Quick Task to perform complete or particular clean-up, including entire PC clean-up, spyware removal, internet clean-up, system clean-up and application traces clean-up.

Having selected the clean-up variant, you can then set its schedule: Daily (only workdays or once every few days), Weekly (such as Tuesday and Friday, or once every two or three weeks, say), and Monthly (time and day). Come to think of it, there's very little this excellent piece of software can't do.

BIOS, Jul 15, 05 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Security