Product Review: Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition

Ad-Aware from Lavasoft has long been the industry-leader in spyware detection and removal and this latest version raises that bar even further. There are commercial versions of this product that have more functionality, but Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition is available for free for personal use and does an excellent job of helping you keep your computer clean from adware and spyware pests.

What Is Spyware?

By knowing more about you- what you like, what you don't like, what web sites you visit, what operating system you use- companies can theoretically develop better products for your needs. More importantly to most companies, they can tailor their marketing better by advertising only the features they already know you are interested in or targeting the distribution of their advertising only to those more likely to want to buy.

To gather information like this, many companies install spyware programs on your computer. They may come with freeware or shareware programs, or they could be installed with off-the-shelf packaged software. You may unwittingly install them when you download and install an applet or program from the Internet. However they get there, these pests can eat up memory and processing resources and slow your computer down and may even perform much more insidious actions as well.

My Review

Lavasoft has been a leader in the anti-spyware industry for some time now and the service they provide the entire Internet community by making such a great product available for free is tremendous. Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition contains tons of improvements and updates from the previous version of Ad-Aware

One of the key things Lavasoft did was to harden the program against being altered or disabled by malware by encrypting the preference files. They improved the memory scanning and created a new technology (CSI: Code Sequence Identification) that can identify new or unknown variants of spyware threats.

The graphical user interface has been improved. It is cleaner and more intuitive and contains support for graphic skins so that you can customize the look and feel of the interface to suit your tastes.

Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition supports scanning CAB files and Lavasoft increased the scanning speed. They also improved scanning of the Hosts file to detect any tampering with that to deter potential phishing attacks.

The bottom line is that spyware is fairly rampant and that when a tool this good is also free there is no reason why everyone should not download and run it periodically to keep their computer clean of spyware pests.