Ad-aware - a MUST have! (Ad-aware)

Member Name: fuzzbuttz

Product:	Ad-aware
Date:	19/05/01 (878 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: free, fast, thorough

Disadvantages: none

Ad-aware from Lavasoft has got to be the one piece of software no surfer should be without! It is a multi-spyware removal utility and it's absolutely free - no advertising, no nag screen, no expiry.

So what does it do? It seeks out all these nasty little cookies that are monitoring your every click each time you go online. And you would not believe how many it finds. These not only allow various companies to spy on your surfing habits, but also can seriously clog up your system.

My daughter's PC was suffering constant hangs & crashes which we thought were related to a Trojan attack we had recently dealt with. However, after running Ad-aware on my own system and finding just how much spyware I had inadvertently downloaded, I copied the program to floppy & advised her to run it. At the time she could not get online herself as Internet Explorer returned a 403 error message regardless of what page she tried to open.

She ran Ad-aware (which only takes a few minutes) and it found 87 references to 6 different pieces of spyware. She allowed Ad-aware to clean her system and hey-presto! Internet Explorer now works perfectly and the system has not gone down since.

Lavasoft does sell a package which includes, among other things, a utility to monitor spyware presence during downloads and allows you to run scheduled scans. This is an investment I am currently considering.

One word of warning. If Ad-aware finds a reference to Web3000, DO seek expert advice before removing these references as there is a procedure you should follow. You can get help from forums.techguy.org (an excellent source of info), Experts-exchange etc.

The last word? Go get it now - and be prepared for a shock!

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