A common pattern for security companies is to offer a free antivirus, a paid antivirus, and a beyond-antivirus security suite. Some kick protection up a notch with a feature-laden security mega-suite, or a cross-platform suite. Adaware checks the free and paid antivirus boxes, definitely. The top-tier Adaware Antivirus Total holds the suite position, but barely. It does offer firewall and parental control, which are typical suite components, but the paid antivirus also includes these. The only thing you get by upgrading to Total is a license for Adaware’s PC Cleaner Pro product, which doesn’t add much in terms of security. In addition, the firewall proved vulnerable to attack in our testing, and the parental control system is plain awful. Don’t count on this product for the comprehensive protection security suites ought to deliver.
How Much Does Adaware Antivirus Total Cost?
A one-year license to install Adaware Antivirus Total costs $39.99, which is the most common price point for standalone antivirus products. However, in the Adaware lineup, this product takes the suite position. Comparing Adaware with other security suites, that price seems like a bargain. The entry-level suite from ESET costs $49.99, Vipre goes for $54.99, and Bitdefender runs you $59.99.
The catch is, Adaware doesn’t offer a volume discount. If you want two licenses, you pay the base price twice, and so on. So, for example, two Adaware licenses costs about the same as a three-pack of Bitdefender or Kaspersky. At three Adaware licenses, you’re paying more than a five-pack from any other vendor, even five-packs of top-tier mega-suites. And five Adaware licenses costs significantly more than an unlimited license for McAfee Total Protection, which lets you install protection on every Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS device in your household.
While this suite looks inexpensive, that’s only true if you’re an old-timer with just a single PC to protect. As soon as you need to cover more devices, it becomes surprisingly expensive.
Shared Antivirus Features
Of course, all the abilities of Adaware Antivirus Pro are also available to the full suite. I’ll briefly summarize my findings here, but to be fully informed about those features, you can read my review of the antivirus.
In years past, Adaware appeared in test result reports from independent antivirus labs, and even earned good scores. However, for several years now it’s been absent. We don’t have any information from the labs about how well Adaware does its job.
My hands-on malware protection test challenges antivirus products in two ways. First, they get a chance to immediately eliminate any of about six dozen malware samples that they recognize. Second, they can bring behavioral analysis and other protective layers into play when I launch the samples that didn’t get wiped out on sight. Adaware detected 96% of the samples and scored 9.4 of 10 possible points. That’s not bad, but Malwarebytes Premium scored a perfect 10 against the same collection of samples, McAfee reached 9.9, and Webroot came in third with 9.8 points.
My malicious URL blocking test uses a feed of malware-hosting URLs very recently discovered by researchers at MRG-Effitas. Adaware’s free edition, lacking browser-level protection, fared poorly. The pro antivirus deflected 93% of the malware downloads, most of them by blocking access to the dangerous website. That’s good, but many others have done better. McAfee scored 100% protection, while Bitdefender Antivirus Plus, G Data, and Sophos came close with 99%.
The same pro-only Web Protection component that steered my test browser away from dangerous malware-hosting pages also serves to detect and deflect phishing pages, those nasty frauds that try to steal your login credentials by imitating sensitive sites. Adaware did a good job of detecting phishing pages when I last tested it. This time around, it totally tanked. Its 30% detection rate is among the lowest scores ever. By contrast, F-Secure and McAfee both scored 100% in their last phishing test, and several others managed 99%.
Other Shared Features
One big difference between Adaware’s free and paid editions is Web Protection. That feature did very well in my malicious URL blocking test, though it failed to foil phishing sites. The pro edition also checks incoming email messages and attachments for malware. With the pro edition you also get Active Virus Control, a behavior-based detection system. In testing, this feature edged the pro edition’s malware protection scores just a bit higher than those of the free edition.
The antivirus includes a basic firewall, but my experience wasn’t great. In testing, it correctly stealthed ports and fended off web-based attacks, but the built in Windows Firewall can do that, so this success is no great feat. The program control component does nothing by default. When I set it to prompt about programs attempting to access the internet, it popped up a query about several essential Windows components, and even asked whether to let one of its own processes access the Internet. Also, I found that I could disable it by manipulating the configuration of its essential Windows service, something a malware coder could also do.
In past years, Adaware reserved its parental control system for this top-tier product. At present, you get parental control with the simple pro antivirus. The change really doesn’t matter because the parental control system is useless. It does nothing but filter access to inappropriate websites, but it doesn’t do that well. In testing, it missed some decidedly raunchy sites, and because it doesn’t handle secure HTTPS sites any clever youth could bypass it by logging in to a secure anonymizing proxy. There are no per-user settings, so turning on parental control is more likely to annoy parents than to provide any control over what kids do online.
Where’s the Suite?
If you step carefully through all the pages and settings of Adaware Antivirus Total, you’ll make an interesting discovery. Now that parental control is a feature of the basic antivirus, there is nothing visible in this suite that isn’t already present in Adaware Antivirus Pro. So, where’s the suite?
As it turns out, this product is more of a bundle than a suite. After your purchase, you should have gotten an email explaining that you can install Adaware PC Cleaner Pro as part of your subscription. If you missed that notice, you might not realize what you’ve got. Taking advantage of the offer is simple. Just download and install PC Cleaner Free from Adaware’s website. When you log into your account from the new installation, it will automatically upgrade to Pro.
PC Cleaner
When I last evaluated this tune-up utility, it added file encryption and secure deletion to the features of the pro-level antivirus. The current bundle does offer secure deletion, but not much more to enhance your security.
In contrast to the mostly white user interface of the antivirus, the cleanup tool has a background that’s almost black. Tabs across the top let you choose Clean Up, Security, Optimize, or Toolbox. There’s also a home icon at left that brings you back to the app’s main window.
Immediately after installation, PC Cleaner asks to run an optimization scan. Once the scan has finished, you have the option to review PC Cleaner’s findings in the Registry Junk, Internet Junk, System Junk, and Invalid Shortcuts categories. Most users will just click the big Fix Now button. If you haven’t already registered, you’ll have to do it now, because the free edition doesn’t fix the problems it finds.
PC Cleaner handles almost all the fixes itself, but it enlists your participation to manage programs, tasks, and services that launch at startup. You can disable, delete, or enable any of the found items, but you probably shouldn’t touch any beyond the startup programs. PC Cleaner gives you advice for those, flagging some as non-essential. Surprisingly, it described Adaware’s own notification tray app as non-essential.
Clean Up Page
Opening the Clean Up page, you’ll find links to launch seven cleanup features. The only true security feature among them is the Privacy scan, which finds and removes traces of browsing history and computer usage. The Registry scan, Manage startup, and Junk files features simply duplicate portions of the main scan.
You can use this tool to uninstall programs (a feature that’s built into Windows). A Large Files scanner reports on all files bigger than a certain size, 10MB by default. Like BullGuard, TotalAV, and Trend Micro Internet Security, Adaware can find duplicate files even if filenames differ. When you proceed to delete unneeded dupes, it warns if you’re about to accidentally delete all instances of a file.
Security Page
Not surprisingly, the most useful security features, Shred files and Device wiper, appear on the Security page. The other three options are less impressive.
When you open the Shred files feature, you can choose any number of files for permanent deletion. You can’t drag and drop files onto the app, nor can you choose entire folders. By default, PC Cleaner overwrites files once before deletion, which should be enough to foil any forensic recovery tool. You can choose three overwrites, which is the number the Department of Defense requires. But don’t bother setting it to 35 overwrites; that’s just too much. The laws of physics indicate that even the most powerful hardware-based forensic tools can’t recover anything after seven overwrites.
The Device wiper feature is similar, except that it overwrites a removable drive. You can choose one, three, or seven overwrites. Be warned; the process is slow. Wiping a 4GB thumb drive took 15 minutes in testing. After the process finished, I was surprised to find all the files still present. It turns out that this feature specifically overwrites free space on removable drives. If you want a total wipe, you must delete all the files first. Odd.
You can click Check security to have PC Cleanup check whether antivirus, firewall, and Windows update are active. Of course, the Security Center built into Windows itself warns of problems in this area.
A data-stealing Trojan can’t get away with much if there’s no personal data exposed. The ID scan checks your computer for exposed personal information. Unlike some tools that use pattern-matching to turn up such data as SSNs and phone numbers, PC Cleaner makes you fill in all the target data. Predefined types include the last four digits of your social and last four digits of a credit card number, as well as national identifiers for Australia, Britain, Canada, and several other countries. For any item the scan finds, you can choose to open it (and perhaps redact the sensitive data), ignore it, or put it through the file shredder.
Finally, there’s the Optimize privacy settings page, with a truly dreadful user interface. It lists 16 privacy-related settings along with columns labeled Status and Option. Status is always on/off or basic/full. The Option column always shows the reverse. If Status is on, then Option is Turn off, and so forth. Selecting an item is awkward because the scroll bar for the list is misconfigured. When you do select one, it’s up to you to decide the correct value. Pro tip: off and basic are always good choices.
Optimize Page
The big scan on the home page is all about cleaning up and optimizing your PC, but it’s clearly not enough, as the Optimize page offers seven additional features. One called Windows repair promises to fix problems with your Windows installation. It warns that the scan takes 30 minutes and requires rebooting twice. Without any problems to fix, I didn’t bother.
A feature called Advanced scan carries a warning that it’s for advanced users only. It cleans up old Windows versions and service packs and manages system restore points, among other things. But you make all the decisions. If you’re not truly an advanced user, leave this one alone.
Like the Optimize privacy settings feature mentioned above, Optimize SSD Settings lets you turn settings on and off. At least on this page PC Cleaner gives you advice as to the correct values. I was put off a bit by some typos in the advice, though. For example, when you choose Prefetch and Superfetch it says that the speed of SSDs “makes prefect and superfetch unnecessary.”
The other items are lightweight. Memory Boost releases memory that apps aren’t actively using. Analyze disk space tells you how much space programs, documents, and other file types occupy on disk. System monitor log supposedly reports recent notifications on topics like system crashes, low memory, or programs added to windows startup. In testing it remained stubbornly blank. Finally, the Windows tools page simply links to built-in Windows tools such as Devices and Printers, System Information, and Disk Defrag.
Toolbox Page
But wait! There’s more! On the page called Toolbox you get seven more features for various purposes.
The License keys feature says it will “collect and manage license keys for all of your software programs.” That’s an overstatement. This feature is nothing but a list of products and license keys that you fill in yourself.
Loading up the Device Drivers component does nothing more than list installed device drivers. That’s not much use, but you can run Adaware Driver Manager to identify device drivers that need an update. Handy! However, performing the necessary updates is a manual process, unless you choose to pay for Adaware Driver Manager Pro.
Buried on this page is a potentially useful utility called Data recovery, which is effectively the opposite of the file shredder. You select any or all of the following categories: Documents, Photos/Images, Music/Audio/Video, and Archives, and launch a scan for recoverable files matching the selected types. An initial scan found thousands of files, most of them deleted by PC Cleaner itself.
For a sanity check, I deleted a few .docx and .jpg files, bypassing the Recycle Bin. Alas, a recovery scan did not find any of my files. I made another try, deleting files using Command Prompt (which bypasses the Recycle Bin). Once again, the recovery scan found nothing. My Adaware contact confirmed that this is “a hit or miss feature” and that it worked much better in previous Windows versions. He admitted that it’s not nearly as good as a dedicated file recovery tool.
The remaining few features are of little interest. Manage popup notifications promises to manage websites that send popups; apparently my test system doesn’t have any. Cleaning report tells you what you’ve been doing to clean up your PC. And Automatic scan lets you schedule PC Cleaner’s activities.
A Loose Collection
The home page of Adaware PC Cleaner Pro includes a cleanup and optimization scan that’s easy to use and that should provide benefits for any PC. Once you get off that home page, though, it’s hit or miss. The remaining four pages present more than two dozen other separate tools, few of which provide any significant security function. I don’t picture the average user trying out more than a handful of these.
Very Small Performance Hit
If your security suite keeps you safe, but at the expense of making your PC seem slow, you’ll give it the axe. Most modern suites are designed with performance in mind, for self-protection, if nothing else. This suite doesn’t go overboard with bonus features, so I thought it might have a light touch. My hands-on tests showed my guess to be correct, even when I installed both the antivirus and the separate PC Cleaner application.
To measure boot time, I run a script that launches at startup and waits for 10 seconds in a row with CPU usage below five percent, figuring that the system is ready to use at that point. Subtracting the time the boot process began, I get the boot time. I averaged multiple runs on a clean test system, then installed Adaware and again averaged multiple runs. There was no significant difference between the boot time with and without the suite loaded.
Security products often monitor file activity, scan files for malware, and perform other background tasks that could slow down normal file operations. I run two tests in this area, one to measure the product’s effect on moving and copying files, the other, on zipping and unzipping files. The last time I tested this product, the average times before and after installing Adaware weren’t measurably different. This time the differences were still small. The file move and copy test took 7% longer and the zip and unzip test took 5% longer with Adaware fully installed.
You’d be hard pressed to notice the tiny performance impact from an Adaware installation. Even so, a few products have exhibited no impact at all. ESET, K7, and Webroot SecureAnywhere Internet Security Plus did not slow down any of my three tests in their most recent evaluations.
You Can Do Better
For this review I’ve treated Adaware Antivirus Total as a suite, but it’s really more of a bundle. You get the unimpressive Adaware Antivirus Pro plus the separate Adaware PC Cleaner Pro. The latter hardly adds anything in the security realm, though some will find its secure deletion component welcome. It’s not even a bargain if you need to protect more than one PC. You can, and should, do better in selecting a security suite.
What should you get instead? For an entry-level suite, as opposed to the massive mega-suite or cross-platform suite offered by some vendors, we’ve identified two products as Editors’ Choice. Kaspersky Internet Security is the darling of the antivirus labs, with top scores across the board. Bitdefender Internet Security has as many features as some mega-suites, and it, too, gets high scores from the labs. Either of these is a much better choice than Adaware.
