Small Business

Get Free Spyware Protection with Ad-Aware Anniversary Edition

By Rick Broida

Updated on: January 21, 2009 / 2:44 PM EST / MoneyWatch

Any fan of freeware is undoubtedly familiar with Ad-Aware, one of the veterans of the spyware-protection game. To help celebrate the program's 10th anniversary, developer Lavasoft has released Ad-Aware Anniversary Edition, which, according to the company, offers the following benefits:

Uses 74% less memory than Ad-Aware 2008.
Only uses 18% of the CPU during scans -- nearly 60% less resources than the previous version, and considerably less than each competitor product tested, including AVG, Kaspersky, Norton, and PC Tools.
Scans 36 MB per second -- faster than each competitor product tested, and over 4 times faster than AVG's.

The free version of Ad-Aware also offers real-time protection, a feature that was previously limited to the Plus and Pro editions. All told, it's hard to imagine a better anti-spyware tool that costs absolutely zero. Ad-Aware Anniversary Edition is free for "personal home use" only, but if you want to use it for your small business, well, we won't tell. [via Download Squad]

Rick Broida

Rick Broida, a technology writer for more than 20 years, is the author of more than a dozen books. In addition to writing CNET's The Cheapskate blog, he contributes to CNET's iPhone Atlas.

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