Brandon Edwards holds a similar philosophy to mine as far as spyware and anti-spyware programs are concerned:

I’ve been watching your videos since the day you started on YouTube. I just watched your video relating to spyware and the program you recommended for protection from it. I just had a thought I would like to share with you.

I used to run antispyware programs and virus protection programs religiously and had them run as a background process as well (did this for probably the better part of 5 years, and they work). The biggest thing I’ve noticed over the last 2-3 years since I’ve stopped using those programs entirely is that I no longer really have any issues with the stuff I was trying so hard to protect against in the first place. I currently do not run any form of antivirus program or antispyware program regularly and run a dual core PC with Windows XP Pro SP2 and dual boot with Vista Ultimate. The only tools I really use to keep my PC in top form are System Mechanic Professional (minus its virus and spyware protection) and Diskeeper (defrag tool). I also still keep Spybot around in case I have some reason to run a manual scan, which is very rare.

To sum up, I would just really like to stress that I’ve you are fairly tech savvy and use a good browser(and some common sense) with a pop up blocker built in(Opera, Firefox, etc.) it’s very possible that all those protection programs you run are doing nothing but slow down your system. However, I’m not suggesting that you don’t keep something around to scan and fix if you have a problem (spybot, superantispyware, etc.) I’m really not trying to denounce the usefulness of some of the protection programs on the market, but for myself and many others they may serve next to no purpose, as I’ve found is the case for me.

See, if people would stop downloading programs from P2P networks and avoid pr0n online… they’d be 99% safer. If you really wanna buy an anti-spyware product, we have a standing 30% discount for SUPERAntiSpyware.