Ad-aware Pick Your Flavor of Adware Protection Forrest Stroud
Pick Your Flavor of Adware Protection
The personal edition of Ad-aware is free for non-commercial use and should be sufficient for home users in most cases. LavaSoft also offers two commercial editions for small businesses and those looking for real-time adware protection. The $26.95 Ad-aware Plus extends spyware detection by offering continuous monitoring and blocking in real time, blocking adware from ever making it on to your system, via the Ad-watch feature.
The top-of-the-line $39.95 Ad-aware Professional edition is designed with the network IT professional in mind, offering a variety of network-specific adware protection features, including the ability to scan mapped drives from one central location, support for customizing configuration options for remote and local scanning, the ability to store and read reference files from any location on the network, and the ability to save log files anywhere on the network.
As far as downsides, other than yet another utility to manage and run on a regular basis, there really aren't that many with Ad-aware. One potential downside is that many of the programs that contain adware components will fail to function properly if these components are removed, so if you have an indispensable freeware utility that takes advantage of adware in order to fund continued development, you'll probably want to flag it for non-deletion.
We also ran into a bug with the freeware edition of Ad-aware when it was in the middle of scanning that prevented us from re-accessing the program after we had switched to another program. In these cases, the program had to be shut down and then re-launched, and we'd have to run the scanning operation again without any additional applications running.
The only other real downside to is that you'll need separate utilities for protecting yourself from spyware and viruses. While it would be ideal to have an all-in-one solution that offers real-time protection for adware, spyware, and viruses — and, while we're at it, one that also automatically handles security updates and patches for major programs and operating systems — there simply isn't a product available that offers such functionality. For now, all we can do is to arm ourselves with the best of each type of tool, and Ad-aware certainly fits into that category when it comes to adware protection and prevention.
Pros: Quick and efficient scanning, freeware version (for non-commercial purposes), automatic update options, easy to use, numerous configuration options
Cons: Doesn't offer protection against or scanning capabilities for spyware or viruses, some utilities with adware components will fail to work properly if the adware components are removed, real-time adware scanning (Ad-Watch) not available in freeware edition
