Review: Lavasoft Ad-Aware Pro 2008 security software

The Pro edition of Ad-Aware 2008 adds virus protection to the company’s free spyware scanner.

It provides two levels of security: the virus and malware scanner, available through the main interface, and the separate Ad-Watch module, which handles real-time monitoring.

Lavasoft has always split its protection like this, though we’re not sure why it hasn’t integrated both tools by now to make things a little easier to manage.

After a short installation, you’re taken to the main interface where you can view statistics and scan summaries, update to the latest definitions and run a scan.

Three modes offer a ‘smart scan’ of critical areas, a full scan of the whole machine or a custom scan for fine-tuning. There’s also a simple scheduler that lets you choose a predefined interval and start time for your scans.

Smart scans shouldn’t take more than a few minutes, but full scans take quite some time. A summary is shown at the end of the scan, but there’s not a lot of information given on exactly what has been found, leaving you with the choice of deleting or quarantining offending files.

There are a handful of options for fine-tuning the software, but despite the interface being fairly simple we were left feeling it could be made more accessible. This also goes for the Ad-Watch tool; although it offers a fair degree of control, it presents the user with reams of tick boxes that are often not clearly labelled.

We were impressed by how comprehensive the scanning tools were, picking up threats in our tests with no problems but, despite offering a number of improvements including virus protection, it does feel a little thin on the ground. The lack of integration of the Ad-Watch component is also annoying and, despite the uncluttered interface, it can be awkward to use, which may put off beginners.