Should You Buy Ad-Aware Spyware Remover?
Ad-Aware is the forefather of them all among adware and spyware removal programs. Lavasoft has been providing Ad-Aware to eliminate malware and spyware since before most people knew it existed. 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. The much acclaimed version 8.0 is a product that has undergone several stages of up-grading and development. 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 note differences between the confusing free version and the more explanatory paid version. In the latter, there you have been many improvements like faster startup and scanning.
In general, the anniversary version is considered to be a step forward. One problem, though, is that the TrackSweep feature is incompatible with the Google Chrome and Apple Safari web browsers. That feature wipes out your web browser history, so this is a definite minus. 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. Some people will tell you that Ad-Aware is the only program that could find certain spyware on their systems and completely eliminate it. However, some people ran such programs as Spybot after using Ad-Aware multiple times and they still had malware. 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. The free version doesn’t provide enough protection to justify its use for many people. Some people complain that it failed to remove malware that it supposedly should have eliminated, and that the developer provided no tech support. Neither was a refund offered when all solutions had been tried and failed. In one or two cases, the most recent version of the software actually froze the person’s computer, and the user finally had to downgrade back to the previous version to use it at all.
Yet on websites with rating scales of 1 to 5, the average score is generally in the region of 3.5 to 4. What this seems to imply is that while the tenth anniversary version of Ad-Aware may not be the absolute best, it’s still pretty good, and worth looking into if you’re shopping around.
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.
