Ad-Aware Free Antivirus Editor's Review

Ad-Aware Free is a privacy enforcement utility designed to protect your computer from malware such as adware, tracking cookies, browsing hijacks or MRU (Most Recently Used) objects. 

Compared to the 'Plus' or 'Pro' versions, this one is only a scanner. You can use it to perform standard scans (main Windows components and registry entries), full scans (scans of the entire system) or custom scans. Scanning the entire system would take quite a while depending on the size of your hard-drives, while a basic scan would be completed shortly. After the scanning process is completed, you can choose to wipe out the new found threats, to ignore or quarantine them. 

Before taking a decisive action, the program will allow you to export the summary of the recent scan. You can also set a restore point to use in case the deletion of items would affect system stability. I liked the fact that the program has a track cleaning tool included. You can use this feature to clean the cache, cookies, history, last typed URL in Internet Explorer, FireFox and Opera web browsers. You can schedule scans on a regular basis. 

Pluses:Ad-Aware Free for personal use. This includes free auto updating service and auto scan option. Multi-language support. 

Drawbacks / flaws: 

In conclusion: Ad-Aware Free is a useful tool, but I'd go for the 'Plus' or 'Pro' version because I believe that it' better to prevent a threat than to try to fix it after it produced some damage.