Ad-Aware SE Personal 1.06, the free version of
Lavasoft's $24.95 Ad-Aware SE Plus, is a significant
update. It scans faster and offers more detailed scan
results and statistics, but it lacks protection against
direct attacks.
Its Code Sequence Identification
feature attempts to identify new spyware variants before
full definitions are available. It now scans all modules
of running processes and can unload offending modules on
the fly. The free version doesn't have Ad-Aware's
Ad-Watch real-time protection module, though. That's not
much of a loss, as it did not actually prevent any
spyware installations in our testing. It frequently
displayed an alarm warning of, for example, a change to
the startup configuration, but did not identify these
changes as related to a specific threat, and even though
we chose to block all such events, the spyware installed
regardless. Only Microsoft's free antispyware seemed to
have any luck blocking installations.
Ad-Aware is better at removing spyware from your
computer. It detected all but one of our sample threats,
and removed two-thirds of those it detected.
Double-clicking a found item brings up a page of local
details, including the item's Threat Assessment Chart (TAC)
rating (on a scale from 1 to 10) and a link to more
information on Lavasoft's Web site. Ad-Aware saves a
very detailed log file of scanning and removals, but the
information is so spread out that we found it difficult
to interpret. More useful is the Statistics page, which
lists all threats the program has found, their TAC
rating, and the number of times each item was found,
times it was removed, and the date it was most recently
found.
Ad-Aware has some interesting advanced capabilities
but lacks some features found in most of its
competitors. You can set it to perform a full or "smart"
scan at start-up, but there's no other scheduling
option. Also, you can't restore single items from
quarantine; you have to undo the entire scan and then
rescan, marking the specific item to be ignored.
Because of its scanning and removal strength, we
recommend using the free version of Ad-Aware as an
additional cleanup step when your main antispyware
program reports trouble.