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 Ad-Aware 6 Plus - part II
by Andrew Cooper
Pressing the Settings button near the top of the window opens the Setting window, which allows you to configure the General settings, Scanning settings, Advanced Settings, Ad-Watch Settings, Automation and Tweak Settings.
The first I was going to set were the Scanning settings, as shown here:
I wanted to scan everything so I checked all the items under Memory & Registry and also enabled archives scanning.
Other Settings let you configure the program to run at your system's start-up, enable start-up scan, specify the details to store in the log-file, configure Ad-watch preferences (I will discuss this useful tool below) and optimize Ad-Aware performance if it works too slowly on your machine.
After specifying the Scanning settings, I was eager to start checking my system for any spyware and adware presence. I'd already removed these types of malicious agents with PestPatrol so I expected Ad-Aware would not find any new parasites.
I pressed "Scan Now" and saw the following dialog window:
When I changed the settings I'd left the type of scanning as "Use custom scanning options". However I forgot to specify which hard drive to scan so I clicked "Customize" to select the drive. then pressed the "Next" button to proceed.
The scan started and quickly it became clear that Ad-Aware is worthy of its excellent reputation:
The scan found 55 items it classified as malicious. Most of them were Data Miners, meaning they did not pose any serious security risks, but on the other hand I do not like the fact they were collecting data from my PC:
To delete all the objects listed I marked them and pressed the "Next" button.
Several days later it became evident to me that while web-surfing such "Data Miners" and other spyware agents would always be infiltrating my system if I did not activate a constant defense against them. Otherwise, I'd have to scan my system every day by activating the "Scan on start-up" option in the Startup settings of Ad-Aware.
Continue to Part III
Back to Part I
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