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Lavasoft’s Adaware is one of the longest established and most well known of the ad and spyware removal tools. There’s a free version which now lacks the automatic scans on start-up that made previous versions such must-haves. You now need to install a paid-for copy to have that functionality, but the price is still pretty attractive.
Scanning time is reasonable – not as quick as some, but tolerable – and you can have a quick ‘smart scan’ each time your system starts up. We found that relatively few infestations were spotted, compared to the other products on test. Each of those has a rating to give some idea of how serious it is, and you can click to see a ‘Threat Assessment Chart’ on the Lavasoft ad site, though we didn’t find the information particularly illuminating.
Other useful features include the ability to create an ignore list, and optional plug-ins that can alert you to Registry changes and other issues. However, even though we were told the detected threats had been removed, they still appeared afterwards, and we still suffered from advertising pop-ups while browsing.
For a product with such a good reputation, we were disappointed at the relatively short list of items detected and we’d like to see more detailed threat reports, to help people decide which things they do need to remove from their system.
Download the FREE version of Ad-aware by clicking here
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