Review

My personal favorite anti-spyware program in terms of thoroughness. It recognizes a lot more spyware than my next favorite, Spybot Search and Destroy. On one machine, I was given a clean bill of health by Spybot. Then I installed and ran Ad-Aware: it found an additional 213 items!

 

No Real-Time Scanning or Scheduled Scans (for Free)

The free version of Ad-Aware doesn't have real-time protection (the Plus version does). This means it cannot catch spyware while it is infecting your system, only later when you manually run a scan. For this reason, I recommend installing an additional anti-spyware utility that does actively scan your system and alerts you immediately, before the spyware does any damage.

Two good active scanning spyware applications are Windows Defender and Spybot Search and Destroy. Windows Defender is from Microsoft and is more user friendly. Spybot Search and Destroy has been around longer and is more thorough than Windows Defender, but its real-time scanning component, TeaTimer, is a bit tougher to learn and use.

Another option is to upgrade to a paid version of Ad-Aware which has active spyware scanning. You'll also get technical and additional features like scanning on a schedule.

 

Save the MRUs!

Ad-Aware, by default, removes what it calls "MRUs," which I think is a poor choice. These are the lists of most recently used items. In practical terms, these are the last four files your opened in Microsoft Word, your autocomplete data, recently run programs and similar items that Windows keeps track of. I use MRUs all of the time and don't appreciate Ad-Aware deleting these links.

If you would like to prevent Ad-Aware from removing your MRUs, click the Start button on the main screen. This will take you to the "Perform System Scan" screen. From there, uncheck "Search for negligible risk entries." Your scan will not flag your MRUs from this point on.