Monday, May 6, 2013
AdwCleaner is a compact and portable tool which can help you
to remove toolbars, adware and similar browser-based pests.
The program's interface is, well, a little basic. Click "Search" and in a moment or two an in-depth report appears in Notepad, describing any issues you might have. Click "Delete" and AdwCleaner will try to delete everything, displaying another Notepad report on the details. And that's about it.
The program's interface is, well, a little basic. Click "Search" and in a moment or two an in-depth report appears in Notepad, describing any issues you might have. Click "Delete" and AdwCleaner will try to delete everything, displaying another Notepad report on the details. And that's about it.
While this is
undoubtedly very simple, our immediate concern is that there's no general way
to tell AdwCleaner what you want to keep, and what should go. The only control
comes in the Options dialog, where you can instruct AdwCleaner to ignore the
Ask toolbar, or not to examine one or more browsers (the program supports IE,
Firefox, Chrome and Opera).
Does it work, though? To
find out, we installed a few free programs, allowing them to install whatever
they liked. And when we ran AdwCleaner, it correctly detected and displayed
everything we'd just acquired: the RelevantKnowledge service, Babylon Toolbar,
Complitly, Smart Suggestor and more.
We clicked
"Delete", and after confirming that yes, we really were sure,
AdwCleaner went to work, closing all our programs, removing the various files
and Registry keys, and rebooting our PC. You don't get much choice in any of
this - there's no "reboot later" option - and, again, we didn't
really feel in control. But when our system restarted, the unwanted extras had
all disappeared, and that's clearly good news.
AdwCleaner is short on
options, then. It's difficult to see or control exactly what it's going to do.
And there's no real documentation, which all goes to make us feel just a little
on the nervous side.
But, at the same time,
the program does appear to do a reasonable job of detecting and removing common
browser annoyances. And so, while it wouldn't be our first choice of toolbar
remover, it might be worth keeping a copy of AdwCleaner in reserve, just in
case you encounter something that your regular tools can't handle.
Platforms: Windows 7 (32 bit), Windows 7 (64 bit),
Windows 8, Windows Vista (32 bit), Windows Vista (64 bit), Windows XP
Version: 2.110
Licence: Freeware
Version: 2.110
Licence: Freeware
Download link:
