WARNING: JUNK AHEAD

Junk offender: Ad-aware Free

“Our legendary anti-spyware with a powerful antivirus”, boasts Lavasoft of its free antivirus (AV) program, Ad-aware ( www.snipca.com/ 21941). It’s underselling itself - it forgot to mention the browser-hijacking extras that come in its goody bag of an installer.

Nothing is ever quite free in the world of AV, you see. Not even the excellent Avast Free Antivirus can resist bundling junk (see Named & Shamed, Issue 476). But at least Avast’s extras are other Avast programs. With Ad-aware, you get a browserful of Bing, the Microsoft search engine no one ever knowingly chooses.

Adware from Ad-aware

Ad-aware starts pushing commercial bloatware (also known as adware) the moment you click Free Download on the URL above. Up pops an advert for a paid-for version, with a big green button to trick you into signing up. To get the free program, you have to click a small grey button instead.

When I ran the installer, dozens of files began downloading, and messages like ‘Registering user’ flew past my bamboozled eyes – before the installer had even opened.

It recognised that I already have an AV installed, and called itself the ‘2nd line of defense’. That’s misleading and potentially dangerous – you should not have two AV programs on one PC.

Still, it’s my job to take risks so you don’t have to, so I pressed on. I haven’t seen junk pushed this hard since I went landfill-spotting in the Thames Estuary. Ad-aware offers two options: ‘Yes… set Bing as my homepage, new tabs and default search engine’ (pre-clicked) and ‘No, don’t protect me’ (see screenshot). Now, who’s going to click ‘No, don’t protect me’ when installing an AV? Less savvy PC users may well be deceived into a Bing infestation that’s hard to remove. I closed and deleted the installer, but Ad-aware left behind dozens of files amounting to 32MB of junk. “Legendary” is not the word I used when clearing the mess off my poor PC.