Ad-Aware Pro Anniversary Edition Review (Page 2 of 3)

I was not a fan of Ad-Watch in previous editions and chose to disable it, but this time, I’m going to keep it active or enabled. The reason is because Ad-Watch Live will not only sit to watch for malicious processes and infected applications but will also watch for changes to your registry by any application then it will also monitor the outgoing network traffic and blocks connections to blacklisted IP addresses.

An example is when a user visits a known bad website or rogue site, Ad-Watch Live! Expert will block it so you are protected from such sites:

The above is one of features of Ad-Watch Live! Expert by monitoring network traffic to bad sites. That's similar to free CoU IP Blocklist for Outpost Firewall users.

Ad-Watch Live comes with different flavors: Basic, Advanced and Expert

• The Ad-Watch Live! Basic is available to the free edition of Ad-Aware AE. It will block malicious processes and infected applications in real-time.
• The Ad-Watch Live! Advanced will offer what the Basic has, Windows Registry protection and the heuristic technology (behavior-based protection).
• The Ad-Watch Live! Expert has all the features found in the above flavors of Ad-Watch and provides additional layer of security by blocking connections to blacklisted IP addresses.

There are three scan modes in Ad-Aware AE and these are Smart, Full and Profile modes. The last time I tried Ad-Aware scanners was last year, using the 2008 edition in which it took 15 minutes for the SmartScan to finished and a long 40 minutes for full scan. There's a huge improvement done by Lavasoft with their new build! The SmartScan finished in less than 2 minutes while the full scan finished in less than 30 minutes.

In one of the above log file and below screenshots, you will see that Ad-Aware detected 2 items that are not infected but false positives (a HOSTS file entries and Nirsoft executable that I believed was used by one of the software that I installed many weeks ago). I asked Ad-Aware AE to allow them at once and it was successful.

You can also scan a single or folder using Ad-Aware’s right-click scan method. Lavasoft called this method as Pin-Point scanning. In the notification area in Windows, the Ad-Aware AE's icon also give handy access and task on its program features:

We regularly recommend to scan our system using the latest available definitions and there are users who want to know What, When and How to scan a computer. With the Scheduler in Ad-Aware Anniversary Edition, these questions is done in no time.

Choosing what to scan is simply choosing if you like to run the SmartScan, Full or Profile Scan. Example scenarios:

• You have two hard-disk or partition where disk 1 is your system drive or system partition while disk 2 is your storage. You created a Profile scan in Ad-Aware AE to only scan the system or OS drive/partition. You named this Profile as “System Scan”.
• Some users has USB external and flash drive or their computer is connected to another drive which is networked (network drive) and prefer to have a separate profile scan for it, so you created a “Network or USB Scan”.
• And last but not the least, you want to scan the system using SmartScan each time there’s new definitions or at Windows startup.

When scheduling using Ad-Aware Anniversary Edition, you can simply choose from the available and customized profile scanner to run and then proceed in choosing when to scan. There’s more… you can also choose How the scanner will attend the result of the scan. You’ll choose to automatically handle it using the recommended settings by Ad-Aware AE or you prefer to decide manually on what it should do (to remove, ignore, quarantine or allow once).

Of course, there is no fun if there are no extra features! Lavasoft understand the need of cleaning the browser for private information that malicious sites or software may use to track you or your browsing activity, Ad-Aware Anniversary Edition offers TrackSweep. TrackSweep will clean-up your favorite browsers: Opera, Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Another cool extra in Ad-Aware AE is the Toolbox. The Toolbox contains standalone tools to manage the start-up applications (using the AutoStart Manager), Process Watch, a Hosts File Editor and the ThreatWork where you can simply browse or drag and drop files to submit suspicious files to Lavasoft.

The Hosts file editor in Ad-Aware AE is a simple Hosts File Manager where you can import and export new or existing Hosts file. It also offers write-protection on the hosts file to prevent any malicious software in modifying or hijacking the hosts file.

AutoStart Manager is a tool to enable/disable or get detailed information of the startup applications in Windows. The feature is offered for the Windows Services that the AutoStart Manager will display.

Some malware will disable access to Task Manager so the addition of Process Watch in Ad-Aware AE is handy and useful standalone tool.

Access to ThreatWork is also in Toolbox. Use this when you want to send suspicious files to Lavasoft. Simply drag and drop or right-click a file to send to ThreatWork:

This edition is customizable and users can change the appearance of Ad-Aware AE. Lavasoft let users choose the language, the theme or skin color of the program and last but not least, to hide or show the Ad-Aware icon in the notification area in Windows (aka System Tray).