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Ad-Aware 2008
Anti-virus/advertising/malware software

25 August 2008

by Huw Collingbourne

Ad-Aware is a good all-in-one disk cleanup tool - but with an annoying licence.

If your computer is connected to the Internet you can never be sure what nasty little visitors are surreptitiously downloading themselves on your hard disk.

Personally, I take security pretty seriously. I have a firewall in place and I also have anti-virus software (from Sophos) installed. When my browser warns me that it thinks the site I am about to visit may be dodgy, I take its advice and go somewhere else instead. Even so, when I tried out the latest version of Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware, I discovered that several thousand little unauthorized visitors had downloaded themselves onto my hard disk.

As it happens, none of these posed a serious threat (it’s always good to know that my security measures seem to be working!). They were ‘tracking cookies’ - small files that store some status information about my browsing activities. Some of these, such as the cookies from blogs of various newspapers, I take to be harmless. The largest number seem to be advertising related, however, which I think I can well do without. And so I was happy to let Ad-Aware purge the cookies.

Now, as I said, I already have some fairly tight security measures in place. If you don’t, Ad-Aware may be even more useful to you than it is to me. The latest releases of the commercial editions of Ad-Aware Pro and Plus not only deal with cookies and the like but also include built-in anti-virus software to protect against viruses, Trojans, key-loggers and other ‘malware’.

There are three editions of Ad-Aware: Pro ($39.95/£29.99) and Plus ($26.95/£19.99) include the anti-virus software and ‘real-time detection’ to locate any malware immediately rather than wait until the user does a ’scan’ of the disk. The Pro edition also has some additional tools such as a process watcher and a network derive scanner. The standard edition lacks these features but does have tools to find and remove spyware, Trojans, bots and rootkits.

The version I tested was the Pro edition. I used this to do a ‘Smart Scan’ which took about an hour and a quarter on a PC with two 150Gb disks. Slightly annoyingly, the dialog that reports the scanning progress truncates the path of the items being scanned so it is not always possible to see exactly which directory is being processed. Resizing the dialog window does not fix this - it only gets you more white space rather than a longer path display.

More seriously, I have reservations about the licensing of this software which restricts the user to a single installation. My own preference is that software be licensed per user rather than per PC. This is what the Ad-Aware registration email states:

“You are free to use it on 1 PC only; however you may also transfer your license free of charge once to your laptop or any other machine. This can be done by uninstalling the software title on 1 machine and re-installing the software title on your new machine, running it, selecting "Reinstall" and entering your License Holder name and Reference number details as provided above.”

You should also bear in mind that the license is valid for just one year. After that, if you want to receive updates to the virus and malware definitions, you have to pay extra (I asked how much this would cost but the ‘update’ price is not currently available). If your company is footing the bill, this may be no problem. For home users, however, a combination of the free edition of Ad-Aware plus the free AVG anti-virus software (which I also use on my other PCs and have found to be very effective), would be a good alternative.

In short, this appears to be a pretty good all-rounder but my opinion would be more favourable if it permitted the purchaser to install the software simultaneously on more than one PC.

A comparative table of the features of the three Ad-Aware editions can be found here:

http://www.lavasoft.com/download_and_buy/product_comparison_chart.php

Buy Ad-Aware from Lavasoft: http://www.lavasoft.com or (in the UK) from PX Software: http://www.pxsoftware.co.uk.