Ad-Aware SE

The chances are, if you use Windows and browse the web, you will have undesirable risks to your privacy lurking away on your PC. At best, your web browsing can be tracked, at worst, you may be giving away your password and pin information for services such as online banking.

Ad-Aware takes over where anti-virus programs leave off. While it's not specifically an anti-virus program, it will pick up on many trojans and worms as well as its main targets of adware and spyware.

The program itself is under 2MB in size, so perfectly reasonable to download on a dialup connection, and so long as you stick with the default settings, pretty foolproof. Better yet, the basic version is free for personal use. For most people, this is perfectly adequate, however if you feel that you need more control, or are using the program in a commercial environment, the Professional Edition will cost you less than $100 NZ.

Even as a very cautious web surfer, I still found a bunch of cookies on my PC, on many other people's PCs I've found much worse, sometimes with a list of results running into hundreds of entries.

The lastest version is supposed to be faster than previous versions. In practice it actually appears to run slower, but it is much more thorough in its scanning.

Hopefully in future, better security in Windows will make products like Ad-Aware unnecessary, but in the meantime, this is a program that every Windows user should have.

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