Eight years ago, Spybot-S&D originally started off as a very fast anti-spyware scanner, detecting some 30 small things, and you could watch it finish in under a minute.

Today, a full scan applies more than 600,000 tests, and you can watch that number grow weekly on our update list. Handling such numbers obviously is quite a bit different, and while we've tried to adjust to that with each version, a full scan might still take half an hour currently. Since this was one big major complaint issue, we decided to integrate parts of the new file scanner designed for a future 2.0 release and optimized for modern malware fighting, and got you a major push in speed now - that same scan will now take five to six minutes only, being about five times as fast as 1.5 was!

If you want to enjoy that speed and know a bit about beta testing, head over to our beta forums and get the first beta! If you prefer to wait for a thoroughly tested public release, we hope to get around to that quite soon.

Oh, and one more thing... there's more up for 1.6: a second big issue we hear often will be addressed, so stay tuned!

Modern Windows versions allow you to set up multiple users with differentiated rights, ranging from administrators to regular users. For various reasons, ranging from default installation settings over the requirements of carelessly written software to laziness, most Windows users are using an user account with administrator privileges in their daily work.

Windows also allows you to run each application with the privileges of a chosen user account. So, while we grudgingly accepted that we won't change people to use restricted user accounts in their daily work, we've decided to pursue a compromise: determine which applications are endangered the most, and allow the user to run those with restricted rights only.

Now, since comfort is the issue that's restricting most users, either directly or through people having set up their system, from using restricted user accounts, we tried to make this process to be as easy as possible, which resulted in Alter Ego. Alter Ego is an application that makes your browser, email application, instant messenger and multimedia player run safer with just three clicks: click here for an animated demonstration.

Visit this forum thread for more information and discussion.

We're excited to tell you that we have improved the scanning for rootkits. Beginning with the first updates in march we have added new anti rootkit plugins for Spybot - Search & Destroy. Apart from that we have also developed a new tool - the RootAlyzer

Rootkits are a technology that is more and more often used by malware to hide themselves on system level, making themselves invisible to standard tools. Our new plugins help Spybot-S&D to detect this malware, and our RootAlyzer shows you anything that uses certain rootkit technologies, even if it's not in Spybot-S&Ds detection database.

You can apply the new plugins for the rootkit search by just updating your Spybot-S&D as usual.

The RootAlyzer is a single tool which goes through the file system, the registry and process related lists. When you start RootAlyzer, it performs a very quick scan of a few important places, taking about a second on modern machines. To check the full system, you have the possibility of choosing a Deep Scan.

Currently, the RootAlyzer is a work in progress (with a new project tools category in our forum to track bugs and feature requests), but it's already helping to easily locate most of the current malware rootkits. It is compatible with Windows NT/2000/XP/2k3 and Vista. If you like to check out the new RootAlyzer you will find it in our forum.