Lavasoft Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+ 11

The Home page of Lavasoft Ad-Aware Free Antivirus+ 11's main window displays a summary of your protection, along with controls to turn major security components on or off.

All of the pages and controls found in Lavasoft's commercial antivirus and security suite are present in the free antivirus. However, nothing on the Web Protection, Email Protection, or Network Protection page is actual available without upgrading.

The Help Center page offers links to product manuals, FAQs, and discussion forums. If those don't help, it lets you send a help request to tech support, automatically bundling your Ad-Aware logs.

From the Scan Computer page you can launch a quick, full, or custom scan. This is also the place to view reports on past scans, check the collection of quarantined files, and manage any files that you've told the antivirus to exclude from scanning.

A full scan with Ad-Aware took about 39, just a little longer than the current average.

The Web Companion component, installed along with Ad-Aware by default, helps you avoid navigating to dangerous websites. It also protects your home page and default search engine against unwanted changes.

Here the Web Companion has steered the browser away from a malware-hosting website.

The first sign that Ad-Aware has identified the current download as a threat is an Access Denied message from Windows. Shortly after that message shows up, you'll see a tiny transient popup in the bottom right corner.