Fair question.
SpywareGuard is still effective against the older malware it was written for, and has virtually no effect on resources.
You can read more about it
here,
here and
here
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The reason for less frequent updates with SpywareGuard is that much of its detection abilities are heuristics in nature. (Basically this means it doesn't need a specific signature for every spyware it catches, simply an overall pattern or approach-used, which it can identify and then trigger off of.) So, SpywareGuard works for many of the newer versions of the same spyware installers even without adding "signatures" for them.
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SpywareGuard is a resident scanner (similar in a way to how an anti-virus program works) which proactively scans files prior to them being executed; looking for spyware installation kits and such. It scans with both known signatures and some generic protection techniques to detect and prevent spyware installation. SG also includes capabilities to prevent browser hijacks and provides built-in download protection for Internet Explorer. Because of all of this, SpywareGuard does run in the background. In fact, there will be two processes related SG in your task manager.
SpywareBlaster is a preventative program. It sets flags in the registry to prevent the running of a specific list of bad spyware related ActiveX controls. This includes general spyware and malicious dialers. It also blocks a list of known spyware related cookies in IE6. SpywareBlaster should be run periodically, say once a week, to check for updates to its database. Other than that it doesn't need to be running to provide protection, so there are no processes run either at startup or in the background.
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Spybot's Tea Timer is really the only one which would use much in the way of resources, and of the three, the most proactive. Most modern machines would not notice it's memory or CPU usage.
Hope that helps.
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