Identity Theft Plus

Ad-Aware is the forefather of them all among adware and spyware removal programs. Lavasoft provided Ad-Aware software to detect, block, and remove the malicious software back before users even knew what adware or spyware were. For some people, finding out about Ad-Aware was the way they first discovered that there were such things as harmful programs that could be put on their computers without their knowledge.

And now the software is celebrating its tenth anniversary. Version 8.0 has now been introduced, following many upgrades and improvements through the years. After being in existence for ten years, how is it faring?

Reviews have tended to be inconsistent. Many people consider the good reputation of Ad-Aware to be well deserved. They distinguish between the free version, which leaves the user somewhat confused, and the paid version. In the latter, there have been many improvements, including quicker booting and scanning.

In general, the anniversary version is considered to be a step forward. One downside is that Google Chrome and Apple Safari web browsers are incompatible with the TrackSweep feature. Because this particular feature deletes your web history, some people find this unsatisfactory. You may want to buy the Ad-Aware Pro version since the free program doesn’t include real-time registry protection or heuristic detection.

Some professional reviewers hold this opinion, but do amateur users like you agree? These opinions are much more varied. On one hand, many people swear that Ad-Aware was the only program that could completely erase all of their malware. On the other, there are those who ran Ad-Aware several times and then had SpyBot or some other anti-spyware software find all sorts of malware that Ad-Aware missed. This is clearly a reflection of the fact that no one program ever finds and eliminates everything, since you read reviews saying exactly the same thing about pretty much every anti-spyware program that exists.

Many of the negative reviews note major differences between the Pro version and the version available for free. For a lot of people, the free version just doesn’t provide enough protection to warrant using it. Some people complain that it failed to remove malware that it supposedly should have eliminated, and that the developer provided no tech support. Nor was a refund, after everything had been tried and had failed. Recent versions of the software were found to freeze the user’s computer, forcing the user to revert to previous versions.

Yet on websites with rating scales of 1 to 5, the average score is generally in the region of 3.5 to 4. The implication is that this program is still a good choice, and although it’s not the top rated program, it’s still worth checking out.

Along with a good anti-virus program, spyware removal software should be a priority to ensure the security of your computer and your personal information. The good news is you don’t even have to pay for it if you use freeware spyware remover software, which you can download from numerous websites that offer freeware spyware removal tools.