"
The NEW Ad-Aware 2007"
I upgraded to the new Lavasoft Ad-Aware 2007 recently. Since that time, my computer's performance has slipped considerably. I didn't connect this to the new Ad-Aware until yesterday when I started to investigate possible reasons for this.
This is what I found:
1. Ad-Aware 2007 (even the free version) installs its self as a "service" called aawservice.exe. This service loads with Windows and is on the system all the time whether or not Ad-Aware is being used to scan the computer. It also accounts for a hugh amount of RAM being used when it is loaded.
2. I went to
www.processlibrary.com to find out what aawservice.exe was and found this:
http://www.processlibrary.com/direct...aawservice.exe. It was only then that I realized that the new Ad-Aware (free one) had installed itself as a service. No free Ad-Aware I had used before had done this!
3. I went into my services and disabled aawservice.exe. But, then Ad-Aware wouldn't run at all. I was getting very mad that a free app I had used for a long time had now installed itself as a service (unnecessarily, since the free one offers no real-time protection).
4. I Googled aawservice.exe and found this thread at the Lavasoft forum:
http://www.lavasoftsupport.com/index...&st=0&p=44081&.
I followed the instructions in Post #20 by pmc2 to set aawservice.exe to "Manual" in my Services and create a start.bat file to put into the Ad-Aware file folder.
5. This worked for me so now I can use Ad-Aware 2007 when I want to (using start.bat) and don't have the service running all the time (which was slowing my computer down big time).
One caution about doing this: Only Admin accounts can run the app using the start.bat file. So, if you have a computer where Limited Users want to run Ad-Aware, you will have to let the service run all the time.
Hope this helps others with the same problem I had.