Ad-aware no longer recommended?

dazed&confused · Jan 29, 2007

Hi. It has been a while since I have had to deal with malware so I am kinda outdated. I noticed that Ad-aware is no longer listed on the Read and Run First thread. Has this program been determined to be ineffective or (even worse) a potential culprit of problems?

My reason for asking is that I had a pop-up for some kind of System Doctor program and I was going to run a scan just to make sure that nothing got loaded without my knowledge. This System Doctor thing was pretty agressive. I right-clicked to close the window and it popped up a second window up that said it had been downloaded, but the bar at the top said that Windows had prevented it from downloading. I think I managed to stop it, but I am a little worried. I have never had one that I right-click on and click "close" but it still tries to download. Does anyone know what System Doctor is? Is Ad-Aware not considered effective anymore? Thanks in advance for your assistance.

-dazed--

chaslang · Jan 29, 2007

The READ ME can take quite awhile to run and everything we put in it is there for particular reasons. Since we try to keep reasonable control over how many tools we ask users to run, we must make decisions about what is useful to both the user and to us. Ad-Aware is just not that useful as far as malware cleanup is concerned. It does not find many of the problems. Since it is not as helpful as some of the other tools we replaced it with, we moved it out of the READ ME and into the Alternative Scans procedure mentioned in the READ ME.

Is Ad-Aware SE worth keeping on your PC as a backup scanner? Yes since it does not use any system resources (the free version) until scanning, it is worth having as a backup scan. Ad-Aware spends too much time reporting cookies (which are not problems) as critical problems and MRUs (not problems) which scare most noobs into believing they have major issues and also making themselves look great because it finds all this stuff. When in reality, they are not reporting all the bad stuff that is really on PCs.

A manual read thru logs like GetRunKey and ShowNew produce reveals many many issues that Ad-Aware never even detects. To be fair other scanners often miss them too, but some at least report the problems and may even say they fixed them when in fact they may not have.

dazed&confused · Jan 29, 2007

Thanks for the clarification. I was a little worried that Ad-Aware might be a bad thing when I didn't see it on the Read Me page. I have been running Ad-Aware on occasion and it never really found anything except cookies and MRUs. I assumed I was in good shape. It's good to know that it is not as thorough as it could be. I will probably switch to something else now. Thanks for your explanation.

--dazed--

chaslang · Jan 29, 2007

You're welcome. Make sure you have read thru the current version of How to Protect yourself from malware!

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Ad-aware no longer recommended?

dazed&confused Private E-2

chaslang MajorGeeks Admin - Master Malware Expert Staff Member

dazed&confused Private E-2

chaslang MajorGeeks Admin - Master Malware Expert Staff Member