On February 5, 2007, Sunbelt Software released CounterSpy version 2, the latest version of their award-winning CounterSpy anti-spyware / anti-adware program. Once piece of great news — CounterSpy v2 works with Windows Vista, in addition to Windows XP and Windows 2000 Professional.
I’d been waiting on the new version to upgrade. I had decided that I didn’t want to run the beta version on my notebook, so I just waited… and I’m happy with the finished product.
First, one of the issues that Sunbelt was targeting with CounterSpy 2 was to reduce the memory requirements of CounterSpy. I see the difference, too. Version 1.5 could take drastically different amounts of memory — I saw a low of 22MB to a high of almost 200MB. I suspect that CounterSpy had its spyware/adware signatures both significantly compressed and encrypted on the hard drive.
However, to try to speed up the constant processing, I also suspect that it had uncompressed the signatures in memory for faster checking. They were probably still encrypted so that other antispyware applications and antivirus applications
All this is simply my speculation of how it could have used that much memory.
Version 2, though, seems much more efficient. A quick Control-Alt-Delete pulls up the Windows Task Manager so I can click on the Processes tab. I see two files, SBCSSvc.exe and SBCSTray.exe.
Read more in CounterSpy 2.0 Released - First Look or download the free full-function 15-day CounterSpy v2 trial now.