Once you have started Spybot-Search&Destroy, you can immediately start scanning.

After you have started the program, you will already see the scan screen. If not, please select Search & Destroy in the Spybot-S&D section in the toolbar to the left.

The search screen contains a toolbar with the most important options (you can move this toolbar between the top and bottom position if you want). Let's start a scan: please press the Check all button.

You will see the scan progress in the status bar at the bottom of the window (the right-most section displayed the estimated time left), and can stop the progress at any point by pressing the Stop check button that has just appeared (it will vanish again once the check has finished).

If the scan has found something, the list will show it. There are three basic kinds of results:

• Red entries indicate spyware problems that should be fixed to avoid security and/or privacy problems. This is the only kind of problem that is preselected to be fixed.
  
  
• Black entries are system internals. If you do not know what they mean, I would suggest to either keep your fingers from it or visit the support forum.
  
  
• Green entries indicate usage tracks. It can do no harm to remove these.

For most problems more information is available. If you select a problem in the list, the button Description of this product should be available in most cases. Press it to read about what kind of threat you have found.

You can now select the problems you want to fix, by clicking the checkbox before it, or by selecting all using the button Select all problems. More selection options are available if you look into the context menu (by right-clicking a problem). The context menu will also allow you to exclude single problems or whole products from further scans (you may later change the exclude settings from the Excludes section).

Once you are sure you have selected what you want to be removed from your computer, press the Fix selected problems button. You will see the fixing progress at the bottom status bar.

If problems can not be fixed now (because they are still loaded and canét be terminated, for example), Spybot-S&D offers to run on next system start, so you can check and fix again.

Should you notice at any later point that you have removed more spyware than you wanted, you can always restore it from the Recovery section.

You can also fine-tune your scan options by selecting special filesets and changing some settings.