New Editors Choice AV at PC MAG

How did you came to that conclusion?

 

Western Europe and North America ?

Not counting tracking cookies ?

Unlikely.

I'd love to see your source. Undoubtedly the source has some interest/bias.

 

Definitely not mine~

 

I was using the free version of Ad-Aware at the start of the year, but ended up ditching it, as I posted here.

Basically I found it to very light overall, but ocassionaly there was high CPU use - which was reason enough for me to uninstall it.

However at the time I would have been running v10.4. The reviewed version was 10.5 which is claimed to offer better performance.

So I might test it again.

 

pc magazine is crap lol

I wouldn't trust any reviews they put out l

 

A real deep review and throughout assessment of their results... LoL

 

It's also worth noting that Ad-Aware has a Compatible Install option which lets you install it along side another antivirus.

I am about to download and do a Compatible Install of Ad-Ware and see how it goes. It's a useful feature and one which is rare.

Also courtesy of Majorgeeks I found this:
You can Ad-Aware Personal Security at the moment for $9.95 instead of $24

Edit: I just did the "Compatible Install" Before the install completed it downloaded the latest definitions did ran a silent scan after which it reported one threat had been quarantined. When I checked out what it was it was just 250+ tracking cookies. I'm hoping I would have been prompted for what to do if an actual threat was found. After the the install finished, I had a look at the interface to see if I could configure what action was to be taken when a threat was found, however I could not find anyway to configure it. Returning to the Home screen I clicked on the Scan Now button, which took me to the scan screen where I could do a quick, full or custom scan. I opted for the quick scan which took just 26 seconds (pretty impressive considering my laptop is several years old, and much slower than current laptops) which found 4 traces of adware - but did quarantine them automatically. Instead, it was left to me to choose what action to take, which is good - if it had automatic quarantining Ad-Aware would already be banished from my laptop.

My conclusion just from running in compatible mode which does not include real time protection, is it's worth taking a look at Ad-Aware. However I don't have any malware samples so personally really can't comment on its detection rate. Also, one thing I liked was that you can enable real time protection from compatible mode - there's a prompt that says extra components need to be installed to enable real time protection, and gives you the option of going ahead and installing them if you want. Of course if you were to do this, you should have no other AV software installed.

 

An update on Ad-Aware.

This morning when I to wake up my laptop from sleep mode, it was running very slowly indeed. For example the mouse pointer movement was jerky and Windows was slow accepting my password. After the desktop came up, I started task manger (although that took sime time as my computer was running so slowly) and found that a process from the Vipre scanning engine had 50% CPU use. I terminated it via task manager, and then right on the Ad-Aware icon and exited Ad-Aware. Shortly afterwards my computer returned to normal with no slowdowns. (This is a long time ago, but I when Vipre was first released I had a problem with obvious high CPU use, which was not showing in task manager).

Normally immediately after waking up from sleep mode, my computer is running just as fast as before I entered sleep mode, so I found this to be unacceptable, even more so because I have Ad-Aware running without real time protection enabled.

I guess I may keep Ad-Aware installed, but set it so that it and the Vipre service do not launch as Windows startup, and will always right click on the sys tray icon and shut down Ad-Aware and terminate the Vipre service after doing a scan.

 

Yes, he's trying to win hearts and minds...

 

Good review from CNET, old Lavasoft was bought by new owners. May be worth a try!

http://download.cnet.com/Ad-Aware-Free-Antivirus/3000-8022_4-10045910.html

 

That's true that Lavasoft was bought out a while back, but I think I'll pass.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/11/lavasoft_has_new_owners/

 

Ad-aware was a good program in its heyday,but its time has come and it needs to lay down and retire peacefully.

 

Why do you say that?

Ad-Aware is an excellent antivirus and free too. While I did have a slowdown issue, perhaps if it's left it running for longer on my system rather than shutting it down right away the issue would have gone away. In any case like any antivirus software the impact on the system will vary from system to system.

I would even go to far as to say that if you are looking for a free antivirus, Ad-Aware Free is definitely worth trying.

 

I restarted my computer a few hours ago, and Ad-Aware started again when Windows booted. So far everything has been fine. I put my computer to sleep, and work it up again with no slowdown.

I did another quick scan, and this time it took just 18 seconds.

 

So it does caching I guess. Mind to test it with EICAR files if you have some time?

 

The EICAR test file was detected by right clicking on the file and doing a scan - I don't have real time protection enabled.




As you can see the scan time was just 1 second. Also, when I right clicked on the file the Ad-Aware window popped up very quickly, and there was no delay before starting the scan. Not like some antiviruses which spend a while getting things ready before starting a scan, or spend time scanning other areas first.




Not relevant to this scan, but as you can see you can choose an action to apply to multiple threats found.

 

Thank you.

I'm assuming that it has a heuristic capability. Can we change the sensitivity? Thanks.

 

Heuristics are disabled by default, and there is only the option to enable or disable them - the sensitivity can't be changed.

 

I'm glad you gave Ad-aware more of a chance than WSA.

 

Since Ad-Aware is being used only an on demand scanner, I was able to terminate it when it caused a slowdown. If it ever does the same again, I will terminate it and prevent it and its services running at startup, and then it won't be an issue. When I want to run a scan I'll launch it, and then shut it down after the scan, and therefore unless I'm doing a scan it will have zero impact on my system.

Something that's not an option for an on access scanner, which is how I was using WSA.

 

Gave AdaWare a try. On reboot it froze the computer. Got lucky and a restore in safe mode got rid of it. Never again for this one sticking with WSA.

 

Sorry i wasnt being harsh towards ad-aware.
I used it for quite a while when i had a vista laptop and it ran just fine.
I will give it a try again at some point ,but over the years it seemed to slowly slip away and lost a large user base.

I assume it uses its own av engine or does it use something else.?

Thanks.

 

hi,

Uses Vipre engine and in-house for spyware

The total security, is g-data.

 

Thanks.

 

Any chance of running this with realtime protection on? to check cpu usage?.I found the old vipre was a hog on my system cpu wise unless i crippled some of the realtime file scanning options.Do you have a screenshot of the performance settings?
Thanks