- Quick specs
- Price: Free; Paid upgrade available
- Operating system: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/NT
- Date added: May 03, 2007
- Total Downloads: 330,068,175
- Downloads last week: 383,704
- See full specifications
A newer version of Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition is available.
(Download doesn't provide access to previous versions of this program.)
- CNET editors' rating: stars
- Average user rating: stars out of 11498 votes
See all user reviews
CNET editors' review
Reviewed by: CNET Staff
Read a CNET review of the full version of Lavasoft Ad-Aware.
One of the first applications built to find and remove adware and spyware, Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition's excellent reputation is well justified. The sky-blue, skinnable interface features five buttons. The first two, Status and Scan, lead to the core function of the application. These buttons initiate a scan of your files for adware components. After scanning is complete, the program presents a summary of results, followed by a list from which you select exactly which components to remove. Right-clicking an individual entry gives some information about the piece of suspected adware, though we would like more details.
Ad-Aware SE can alert you to more malignant forms of malware by separating items into critical and negligible categories. The third button, Ad-Watch, is nonfunctional in the Standard version. The fourth button, Plug-ins, shows you which Ad-Aware plug-ins are installed. The fifth leads to the help files.Ad-Aware SE does an excellent job of quickly finding and removing most adware and spyware components, although you will have to restart and rescan for a seriously infected machine. We were pleased to see an auto-update feature included with the program, keeping Ad-Aware up-to-date with the latest adware components. Ad-Aware SE should be part of your arsenal for keeping your machine free of adware and spyware components.
Watch the CNET video review of Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition:
Publisher's description
From Lavasoft :With the ability to scan your RAM, Registry, hard drives, and external storage devices for known data-mining, advertising, and tracking components, Ad-Aware SE easily can clean your system, allowing you to maintain a higher degree of privacy while you surf the Web.
Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition boasts a number of improvements. Extended memory scanning now scans all modules loaded by a process. Scanning uses the all- new CSI (Code Sequence Identification) technology to identify new and unknown variants of known targets. Extended Registry scanning now scans Registry branches of multiple-user accounts and performs additional smart checks to detect dynamically created references. Scanning speed is noticeably faster, and this version offers an Extended Scanning mode for known and unknown/possible browser hijackers.
New in version 1.06: Disk-scan is approximately 30 percent faster. CSI scan is now more efficient. Added "Scan for low-risk threats" option, to scan for targets with low TAC index. Ad-Watch CSI engine performance highly improved; using less CPU and Memory as well as having a smaller footprint. GUI adapted to use the new TAC.
What's new in this version:
New in version 1.06: Disk-scan is approximately 30 percent faster. CSI scan is now more efficient. Added "Scan for low-risk threats" option, to scan for targets with low TAC index. Ad-Watch CSI engine performance highly improved; using less CPU and Memory as well as having a smaller footprint. GUI adapted to use the new TAC.
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User reviews of Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition 1.06
- Average user rating: 3.8 stars out of 11498 votes
- My rating: 0 stars Write review
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Showing 5 of 443 user reviewsSee all 443 user reviews
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39 out of 55 people found this review helpful
Version: Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition 1.06
Pros: Its free and very easy to use.Lots of updates are available often.This has been a long time favourite of mine.
Cons: Sadly its being left in in the dark ages now, with recent new antispywares surpassing it.I ran a scan today and again found nothing.I ran a scan with Counterspy and it found "Backdoor Prorat" I did not remove it, then did a spy scan with SpyEmergency and that also picked up "Backdoor Prorat" of which I removed.Sadly,Lavasoft Ad-Aware is now off my system for the first time in 4 years.
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13 out of 19 people found this review helpful
Version: Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition 1.06
"Works well--faster than previous version"
Pros: This updated version of Ad-Aware is somewhat faster at scanning. Other than that, I'm not sure what else is different.
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18 out of 22 people found this review helpful
Version: Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition 1.06
"NEW Version!!! ??? really???"
Pros: Easy to use. Easy to update. Ranks high on finding and getting rid of junk and bandwidth stealers from your PC. Fixes some that the others don't find.
Cons: This "New" version was added May 3rd. I got the C/Net email and was like "YIPEE!!!" and then I downloaded it. Come to find out that the only thing new was the DAT file that it comes with. That is nice to have I will agree and shouldn't be listed as a CON, but... it's 39 days old already. What kinda testing does C/Net have to do before they approve the new update? Because I have downloaded some real dogs from here that would be nightmares to get rid of if I weren't testing on virtual machines.
It is still a great product though and recommend it everyone. Especially if you have kids that are on the net.
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9 out of 11 people found this review helpful
Version: Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition 1.06
Pros: This program is my first stop if something is wrong with a PC. The new update, I think, is a fix for Vista. I am seeing a lot of that. Adaware always finds the nasties, including Alexa related stuff in Windows! Good stuff!
Cons: No active background runtime. Adaware does not catch anything coming in, it only finds them in scans.
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0 out of 1 people found this review helpful
Version: Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition 1.06
"excellent/ Almost as good as Spybot - Search & Destroy 1.4"
Pros: I was pretty impressed this program is almost as good as Spybot - Search & Destroy 1.4 .. sometimes spybot catches something ad-aware dose not, but also somemtimes it is the other way around...
- See all 443 user reviews Write review
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