The Facts: Ad-Aware Versus the Competition

Maximum protection meets ultimate efficiency.

When it comes to describing Ad-Aware, those are not just empty words.

A large number of today’s anti-malware products are bloated with layer upon layer of extra bells and whistles that slow down your scans, as well as your PC.  By focusing on your core needs, Ad-Aware Anniversary Edition provides advanced threat protection, and is significantly lighter and faster than our previous versions – and many of our competitors’ products.

Many of you have asked about how Ad-Aware compares to these other security products. In December 2008, Lavasoft performed extensive research to find out how Ad-Aware Anniversary Edition’s performance measures up to top anti-virus and anti-spyware products on the market today. In the charts below, see for yourself how Ad-Aware’s performance and cleanup of infections stack up. The full comparison, as well as the test configuration and the specific versions of the software, can be found in our Performance and Cleanup Comparison report.

Performance Comparison
The charts, below, show key findings of the comparison of memory usage, CPU usage, and scan speed of popular anti-virus/anti-spyware programs.

Our new version uses nearly 14 times less resources when an infection is executed during real-time protection.

Ad-Aware Anniversary Edition only uses 18% of the CPU during scans. This is nearly 60% less resources than previous versions.

Ad-Aware scans about 36 MB per second.

Cleanup Comparison
In many cases, even after scanning and removing infections from your computer with anti-malware software, fragments of the infection are still left behind.The charts, below, show key findings of the comparison between popular anti-virus/anti-spyware programs, and their cleanup processes of common infections.

* Hotbar was not detected by Kaspersky or AVG, thus the infection was not removed by these programs.

* Taskmqr was not detected by AVG, thus the infection was not removed by this program.

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The full comparison, as well as the test configuration and the specific versions of the software, can be found in our Performance and Cleanup Comparison report.