Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+ 10.5

Ad-Aware originated in 1999 as a tool to warn users about "Web beacons"?tiny, invisible images used by advertisers to track online activities. It evolved into an antispyware tool and then into a full antivirus, capable of fighting all types of malware. The latest edition, Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+ 10.5, turned in an impressive performance in PCMag's own antivirus tests.

The previous Ad-Aware, version 10.0, was a thorough rewrite; I noted in my review that it felt more like a 1.0, with the concomitant glitches. Version 10.5 seems much more stable and didn't exhibit the problems that caused me to downgrade the score of version 10.0.

Smooth Operator
When you launch the Ad-Aware installer, it downloads the very latest components, to ensure you don't immediately have to update. It also downloads the latest antivirus definitions. Once you've rebooted, its protection is completely ready.

Ad-Aware installed without a hitch on ten of my twelve malware-infested test systems. Ransomware on one system hid the desktop, making it inaccessible, but tech support supplied advice that let me get Ad-Aware installed on this one.

Malware on another test system interfered with the installer's ability to download fresh components, making installation impossible. Tech support supplied an alternate full-product installer that contains all components, with no need for downloading. That one installed just fine.

A couple of the test systems hung repeatedly during the clean-up phase after a full scan. Retrying the scan helped one of those; retrying in Safe Mode let the other one complete its cleanup. What a difference from version 10.0, which effectively "killed" one test system, making it unbootable. The current Ad-Aware gets five stars for ease of installation.

Good Malware Cleanup
On finishing a scan, Ad-Aware summarizes its results and offers a button to "Fix All Now." Naturally I dug a bit deeper, opting to view the files it had found. I was pleased to see that the scanner defaults to Disinfect for virus-infected files; all too often antivirus products will simply quarantine those files. I let Ad-Aware take the recommended action for all found threats and then tallied the results.

Ad-Aware detected 83 percent of the threats, more than any other product tested with this current set of samples. Yes, you'll see in the chart below that Emsisoft Anti-Malware 7.0 "with help" detected 86 percent, but it reached that detection level with hours and hours of work by tech support using over a dozen third-party tools. I can't count that as a score earned by the product itself.

avast! Free Antivirus 8 only detected 75 percent of these samples, but due to more through cleanup of what it did find, it scored the same as Ad-Aware, 5.8 points. Emsisoft (without tech support help) also detected 75 percent, but came in with just 4.8 points.

Tested with my previous malware collection, AVG Anti-Virus FREE 2013 detected 87 percent and scored 6.5 points, just a hair below Norton AntiVirus (2013) and Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus 2013. Norton and Webroot are both Editors' Choice products for overall antivirus protection.

In addition to the detection rate and overall score for each product, the chart below also offers a score for ease of installation. As noted, Ad-Aware gets five stars because it installed with hardly any help from tech support. AVG and avast! rated just two stars because of the huge amount of work needed to get them installed and fully functional. For details about my malware removal test, see How We Test Malware Removal.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/BAgxW7886iY/0,2817,2418686,00.asp

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