Customer Reviews
spyware doctor's customer support is nonexistant 
2008-01-27
I purchased the spyware doctor software and the registery mechanic software last week. the charge showed up on my credit card but i have never received a registration number email. when i used their system to send them my problem, i heard nothing. there is no phone number to call when the web report doesn't work. so i am here with a product on my computer i cannot use because it is not registered and i do not know how to reach a real person at this company.
A product is only as good as its support system. This one is not good.
Way Overpriced, questionable behavior 2008-01-27
I must mention that I downloaded spyware doctor starter edition from google as part of the google pack. I also use Live Onecare, and while I am no fan of Microsoft, it has yet to let me down. The program conflicts with Live Onecare and doubles start up time. I have four PC's and following the download, everyone one showed suspect programs. I was suspicious. Much of what was found however, were tracking cookies. I view these as harmless. However, I found Trojan:win32/Agent. Since every time I ran spyware doctor it did a system restore, I suspect that is how the file got in system restore. Live OneCare appeared to not remove it and would find it at every reboot. I did a complete scan, and created a restore point after the Trojan was removed. Then I did a disk cleanup and removed all but the most recent restore point. I was assisted by Microsoft. Why pay $29.00 for something when you can pay $49.99 or at Circuit City get Live Onecare for as little as $19.95 and put it on three computers. Say what u want, but it fixed a problem that spyware doctor did not. I do not want to think that a company would download malware to sell their product, however, I had to do a system restore on all four machines to the point prior to the installation of spyware doctor which is gone, like Amelia Earhart. Overpriced, use Live Onecare.
Yes ~ problems! 2008-01-20
Hi. So pleased to read that others have had problems with this product. Wasn't too bad to begin with a year ago, although it did seem to slow things down quite a bit and take AGES for my pc to boot.
But it's got worse & worse over time. My pc freezes constantly, whether I'm opening a webpage or just a Word document & I have to wait anythin from 1 - 3 minutes for it to continue. Drives me mad! (And makes me laugh when they say above that it runs in the background without interferring with anything.)
Just recently I had to use my pc for an important PP presentation (plus music) for a show in the West End. I deleted Spyware Doctor coz I wasn't gonna be usin the internet and the whole thing ran fantastically fast & perfect. Afterwards, I reinstalled it and ... here we go again... slow, slow, slow.
My pc has actually closed down 3 times on its own accord and when I rebooted, it says it is "recovering from a critical error". The report that comes back always says that it is due to Spyware Doctor.
But it's good at preventing/removing viruses so I am afraid to delete it.
What to do!?!
This is the only product that fixed my system! 
2007-12-22
I don't understand all the negative reviews about this product draining their system resources. My system runs without me even noticing it there in the background. These guys must have other issues with their systems, I run an older P4 with no problems what so ever.
Now, the real beauty of this product is that it saved me from throwing in the towel and reformatting my hard drive because of adware issues. I had tried several products to scan my hard drives and nothing could clean it up! I decided to try one more product, Spyware Doctor, which was both toauted and damned by a number of users. Anyway, the test scan discovered the Virtumonde Adware program on my system. I did some reearch and found out that this sucker was responisble for throwing up ads left and right on my computer. It was driving me nuts and I was happy to know that it was finally discovered. I bought the product and was at first disappointed when it could not delete the program, it would just stall during the cleanup. That pesky program was resisting termination! I decided to run in safe mode and wala! it was terminated and I have since had no more adware issues! My system runs like new again.
I now keep Spydoctor OnGuard running at all times and it does not drag down my system. I also scheduled deep scans to run at 2:00am twice a week.
I highly recommend this product to anyone that needs help with spyware/adware problems. It really worked for me.
Continuous Billing 2007-12-19
Spyware Doctor is a memory hog requiring over 100 megabytes on random access memory (RAM). It caused all kinds of problems with my computer that resulted in my removing it and deleting it from my computer. In addition, PCTools continued to bill me for subsequent years.
spyware doctor is a quack 2008-03-31
It used to work before version 5, but now kills my PC. My only option was to restore to an earlier date. A ".dll" file was then missing and it would not automatically run - thank goodness. Version five point whatever is worse than junk. I was able to 'fix' my PC by 'restore', and when I downloaded SD again, the same thing happened. I don't need to download it a third time to prove to myself that is the problem. It killed the PC speed to almost nothing each time it was re-installed.
Spyware Doctor Ver. 5.5 a Disaster 2008-03-25
I had used previous versions of Spyware Doctor for years without any major problems. I recently tried to install the 5.5 Upgrade and it resulted in a frozen screen, and hours of recovery efforts. You better know how to start your system in Safe Mode, and use Recovery Points when you try to install this mess. PC Tools does not respond to your service requests, and my Service Ticket has gone unanswered for a week. It's like there is nobody at PC Tools to help. My advice is to stay away from this giant fiasco caused by Spyware Doctor 5.5 unless you want to practice your system recovery skills.
Version 5 unusable 2008-03-25
As of March 25 I'm having the same experience as others here: SD does catch problems other scanners miss, and can successfully remove some infestations other products do not. However while Ver 4 worked properly, with the real-time protection enabled Ver 5 slowed all three of my fully patched XP SP2 systems to the point where they are unusable, then eventually freezes the system. My advice is that if you MUST use this product to removed a specific infection you enable it for that specific purpose than immediately disable it afterwards.
DO NOT BUY SPYWARE DOCTOR 2008-03-06
Do not buy this product!!!! It's a terrible product sold by an invisible company. You cannot contact them. They will not respond. It will freeze-up your computer. You cannot uninstall it. And the company will continue to charge our credit card. If you buy it, you'll be sorry and don't say that I didn't warn you!!!!
Hidden Auto-Renew 2008-02-20
Do not buy anything from PC Tools without understanding that there is a yearly auto renew included in the agreement. This web company just want to pick up your money. You should stay away from the PC Tools payment processor "Element 5" too.
This software is a bag of crabs, period. It slows your PC as you can't imagine and is impossible to completly remove without formating.
Again Stay away.
Good Luck.
