Ad-Aware Free Internet Security 9.0

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• Quick specs
• Price: Free; paid upgrade available
• Operating system: Windows 2000 Professional/XP 32-bit/Vista 32-bit/64-bit/7 32-bit/64-bit
• Date added: December 05, 2010
• Total Downloads: 364,797,845
• Downloads last week: 265,924
• Product Ranking: #2 in Spyware Removers
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• CNET editors' rating: 4.0 stars
• Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 12038 votes
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CNET editors' review

Reviewed by: Seth Rosenblatt on December 06, 2010
The bottom line: One of the first applications built to find and remove malware and spyware, Ad-Aware's reputation is well-justified. The latest version continues the publisher's tradition of adroitly addressing user concerns, yet some annoyances remain.
Review:
Ad-Aware 9 continues the development progress that publisher Lavasoft began in the previous version. No longer content with offering only malware protection, Ad-Aware now includes antivirus protections licensed from Sunbelt, the makers of Vipre, as well as interesting in-house improvements.
Lavasoft first started changing Ad-Aware's protection engine more than a year ago in version 8.1, when it introduced Genotype. This heuristics-based technology identified identical snippets of code across multiple threat mutations. In version 9, Genotype receives support from what Lavasoft calls "Dedicated Detection." This tech looks inside files, analyzes the code, and creates a loose pattern for finding families of related malware. The company touts that a single dedicated detection signature can detect hundreds of thousands of threats. More importantly, Lavasoft expects that dedicated detection will lower false positive rates by creating more points of comparison.