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AD-AWARE SE PERSONAL
This is a reprint from the April 2006 issue of TOE (The Outer Edge)
By Jim Thornton
One of the more popular spyware detection and removal freeware programs is Lavasoft's Ad-Aware SE Personal. Ad-Aware was developed by a Swedish programmer and is available from a U.S. company over the Internet by doing a Goggle search for Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE Personal. There are several versions of Ad-Aware, but only SE Personal version is free. The SE Plus costs $22.90 and SE Professional costs $33.95. Freeware is a computer program that the developer and/or company does not charge for in contrast to shareware programs.
After you download the 2,789 KB (K = kilo or 1,000, and B = byte, a unit of measure of data) file, install, and launch Ad-Aware, a Status window displays the current version of the Definition File, the date and time of the Last Scan, the total Objects removed, the Total scans, the Objects in the Ignore List, and the Objects Quarantined.
A few more definitions: A definition file contains profiles of programs that have been previously identified as a virus or spyware, and the list of definitions needs to be very frequently updated - at least once a month if not weekly - in order to catch the latest ones; an object is a spyware program; an ignore list is a list of identified objects where the user has decided not to take any action, such as to quarantine or delete the objects; and to quarantine is to totally isolate the objects - to place them into "solitary confinement."
Previously, the first step after you installed the program was to configure it to set its numerous options, which needed to be done only once. The program's current version 1.06 now has all of the options properly set, and there is no longer a need to set the options.
Before beginning any scan, always download the current definition file. After the current file is downloaded and installed, the first scan that you should run is the Full Scan, which will take several minutes and does a complete scan of all of your hard drives, external storage devices, RAM, and the registry.
Later scans may be done using the Smart Scan option, which is faster.
At the end of the scan, you will hear the completion sound. I personally find the sound annoying and have replaced it with a more pleasant sound - one from the numerous wave files that come with Microsoft Office. Just to go the Lavasoft subfolder under the Program Files folder on your hard drive and change the name of the sound file from alert.wav to alert.vaw. Next copy the desired wave file to a working location where you can change its name to alert.wav and move the file into the folder where the original alert.wav file was located.
Upon completion of a scan, the Ad-Aware window displays with the usage statistics, including the quantity of quarantined objects. Click the underlined Open quarantine list option to show a line entry of the quarantined objects found for each scan if you hadn't removed the objects previously. These founded objects should be removed. Just highlight the line and either click on the Delete box at the bottom of the window or depress your computer's Delete key, and those unwanted objects are history.
I found that this program, while doing a good job in identifying spyware, is lacking in several other areas. First, the program does not have a scheduler to automatically run it. Nor can Windows' Scheduled Tasks control it. Next, it doesn't provide any real time protection; spyware is identified only when you perform a manual scan. It places too many unwanted desktop icons on your computer. It should have a fuel gauge-like display to keep you informed of its progress in scanning. It also doesn't have the option to automatically delete all detected spyware; you must manually delete the spyware found in each scan.
I do like the option during installation that lets you direct where to install the program on your hard drive - either under All Users, your name, etc. I like to have all programs grouped together in one location on my hard drive. In the shareware versions of this program, many of these limitations are overcome. Ad-Aware has been recently rated by PC World, a popular monthly computer magazine, as one of its top choices.
An interesting measurement of a product is in comparing the size of its Help file - Ad-Aware's manual is 995 KB, which is the largest of all programs reviewed. Another measurement is how many users have downloaded the program from the PC World Web site - the figure for Ad-Aware is 11.7 million - the most popular. Some computer radio program hosts suggest that you should run Ad-Aware followed by another similar antispyware program. My experience is when I run the other program after Ad-Aware, nothing is found.
Ad-Aware runs on Windows 98, Me, NT, 2000, and XP operating systems.
