Ad-Aware Free Antivirus +

A newer version of Ad-Aware Free Antivirus + is available.

• 1.0 stars

  "Worse than the adware it claims to protect you against."

  February 17, 2013  |   By dtutelman

  Pros

  None so far. I haven't had a chance to run it so far, because I'm too busy UN-doing the unwanted things its installation did.

  Cons

  It insinuates Lavasoft (in other words, ITS OWN ADWARE) into a bunch of my operations. So far, I have been unable to remove them successfully; they keep coming back.

  Summary

  Installation has screwed up my normal operation. So far (and I'm nowhere near fixed yet, so I don't know what else it may have done):
  * It wiped out the current pages in my default browser (Chrome), and restarted Chrome with ONLY its own page. I keep some default pages up on Chrome, and it took me five minutes to restore them. Yeccchhh!
  * It installed the Lavasoft page as my home page in Firefox. I am unable to change it. This is REALLY annoying. It treats any attempt to change back to Google as my home page as a violation of something it is protecting. Even clicking, "Yeah, go ahead and do it," does not get the job done; when I start Firefox again, we're back to Lavasoft as the home page.
  What a mess!
  
  Updated on Feb 17, 2013

  Well, I did manage to fix the problems the installation introduced. Then I ran a scan. It was a Full scan, and took over four hours!
  
  * The scan found some threats (mostly trojans) that my usual antivirus (AVG) didn't catch. Don't know whether Spybot would have found them, because I ran Ad-Aware first.
  
  * It also found a lot of cookies I told it to get rid of them, and it did. Unfortunately, I found that they included a bunch of VERY useful cookies that the old Ad-Aware and Spybot never worried about. For instance, I have preferences and even permanent logins at favorite sites, and had to restore them from scratch; they were in the destroyed cookies.
  
  It's a mixed verdict. Ad-Aware is a horrible mess to install and get your computer back to where you want it. But it seems to serve a useful purpose. Next week, I'll do a scan again, but I'll run Spybot first. If Lavasoft doesn't catch anything Spybot missed, I may just stop using Ad-Aware altogether.

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1 reply to this review

• Reply by LavasoftSupport on February 18, 2013

  Dear dtutelman,
  
  Thank you for your post and I am sorry for the issues you encountered. The install process has been simplified but you must click the "custom" install to remove the Blekko search engine. As for the scanning the first full scan will take a while every scan after that it will take a lot less, it will only scan the files that were added or changed.
  
  Kind regards,
  Corina - Lavasoft support

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