A new challenger has arrived!

Pros: It's really easy to use, but at the same time very powerful. It's a great competitor to CCleaner. The best part is the registry cleaning utility that finds those pesky stray entries that CCleaner can't. It's also nice that the registry is automatically backed up so you don't need to worry about finding the backup if something goes wrong. It's also great that it tells you why it's safe to delete something rather than just listing them all there and letting you figure out if it's safe or not. There are so many utilities available that almost all maintenance can be performed using Glary Utilities using a single click.

Cons: The disk clean up utility is a bit lacking. It's nowhere near as good as CCleaner's disk cleaning capabilities. It misses alot of temp directories that could use some cleaning.

Posted: 24-Jul-2008 08:37:37 AM

Great Defragger at a Great Price

Pros: UltimateDefrag is much better than the standard Windows defragger. This offers the ability to optimize the file placement to improve disk performance. There are several extra features like scheduled defrags and boot-time defrags to deal with those locked files. Power users will like it since it has so many options on how to defrag the drive. The circular drive map is also a nice touch since it gives a visual representation that more closely matches a drive platter.

Cons: The large amount of options may be a bit overwhelming to the user. Fortunately, there is an auto setting, but users may not know to select that one since it's not the default option. The user interface can be confusing to some people due to it's orientation towards power users. I found the defrag process to be a bit slow, but it was probably a result of the thoroughness of the file placement optimization. Finally, the estimated remaining time is completely inaccurate. It estimated that it would be done within a few minutes for half an hour.

Posted: 23-May-2008 06:44:30 AM

Disappointing...

Pros: It was able to detect common malware or various privacy intrusive items. The interface was easy to use and offered enough advance options to tweak the program to your liking without being overwhelming.

Cons: Scans took significantly longer than in the past versions. It doesn't seem to be any more thorough with scanning, but it takes much longer.

While scanning it had used more than 300MB of RAM. While this probably isn't an issue for people with 1GB of RAM or more, it does seem pretty ridiculous that it requires that much memory. Other malware scanners can get by with just a couple dozen MB of RAM usage so what does Ad-Aware 2008 do that needs 10 times more?

After closing the application there were still various processes left behind. Since I didn't have auto update or real-time protection active I don't understand why there needs to be some processes left running. The worst part is that when I manually terminate them, they come back and using even more memory than before.

The inefficiency of the application doesn't outweigh the benefits since other malware scanners are capable of doing a similar or better job without all of these issues. Ad-Aware SE was a good product, but somewhere after that Lavasoft decided to make a U-turn.

Posted: 25-Jun-2008 09:18:44 AM