Ad-Aware 2008
I expected garbage.
Pros: What I got was n extremely decent secondary anti-malware scanner. The GUI matches my Vista Ultimate theme, scans in about the same time as my #1 anti spy program, Spy Sweeper. All this after what used to be my favorit, Spy Emergency took a backward slide in 2008. That is on my Vista Ultimate system it freezes itself and the entire system at about 21,000 files (& 25+ minutes into the scan). Ad-Aware 2008 is better then I'd have expected now as Ad Watch & auto updating are now disabled in the free version.
Cons: A little over aggressive on cookies.
Ad-Aware 2008
It's ok on my Vista ultimate system.
Pros: Though I can't speak for anyone else, this app seems to be fine on my Vista system. Scans as fast as any other of it's kind, looks great, updates often even though it as to be done manually. I really like the counters, time, path and item so it's fun to watch it. Just installed it a few days ago and I've only had one of what could be called a false positive on a website that I feel is clean, so I set it to ignore, (easy enough to do). Now that the auto updating & add watch have been removed, it's much better then the 2007 version. Might be some haven't really given it a chance after last years garbage program.
Cons: I can't complain about it as a backup scanner. It seems to compliment my paid program well. It took them way to long to get this all worked out but it seems much better now.
Ad-Aware 2008
The most popular spyware remover.
Pros: It has 2 levels of scan & nearly always finds something to remove, even if its only tracking cookies.
Cons: I cant see how ths is any better than the previous version.
Ad-Aware 2008
Ridiculous!
Pros: I was excited about this since many people said there were a ton of improvements. I'll give this a few props since it was able to install properly, meanwhile it didn't work on everyone else, so it made me feel more fortunate.
Cons: This is awful. Doing a smart scan finds 39 infections and I had to cancel the scan in the middle of 5 minutes because it takes way longer than the SE version. 39 infections?! After I stopped scan, I didn't find any place to view what I got infected with. It must have found a lot of tracker cookies like SE but even my small to decent adware/spyware scanners didn't find 39 infections; hard to believe ad-aware was telling the truth unless they really did make this major improvement.
Interface, to me looks a lot like the 2007 version, still glossy and crappy and eating up all my RAM while scanning and even having the program open makes my computer slow. The scan tends to freeze once it reaches my C:\Windows folder and files and caused my Opera, Firefox, and Pidgin to "not respond" which never happened to me before.
Still, a wonderful 25.19MB after installation added on which we don't even know where all the clutter comes from. While installing, it also prompted me to remove my SE version and I refused. It seems like they tried to move people up and force us to use the latest version.
Scanning time takes almost four times longer than the original SE version, and the RAM usage is also almost four times more.
This program keeps getting worse everyday and I'm definitely going to stick with Ad-Aware SE. This version (2008) is worthy of scold.
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