What is Adware?

What is adware? Adware by definition is software that automatically displays or downloads advertising material such as banners or pop-ups when a user is online.  This is usually in the form of toolbars, search engines, home page take-overs etc. They usually attack your browser by changing preferences in order to market and collect data from you.  By changing your home page or search engine the chances are you'll search via their software and as a result will allow them to be able to collect the data they need.

You might be wondering how adware can simply find its way onto a computer and change these kind of settings without your knowledge or permission.. well they can't, you might not notice but somewhere along the line they will ask you to allow them in by agreeing to their terms and conditions. This gives them your consent to install themselves on your device.

The most common way of unintentially installing adware is through installations of other programs. Freeware is usually the most targeted type of software as it tends to get very high download quantities, often global too, which is very attractive to adware companies. They will approach freeware software developers and offer them money to be included in their installation flow.  They tend to make them quite discreet, however, it's down to the end user who doesn't pay proper attention when installing the software.  Most people will click 'next' and 'I agree' without reading what's on the screen or hidden in the terms. Somewhere in here you'll be agreeing to allow the installation of a certain adware program.

The easiest and most effective way to prevent the installation of adware is to make sure you pay attention to what you're actually installing, when it comes to setting up some new software. You don't need to read all the terms and conditions to know you'll be agreeing to the installation of another program, the first line or two will give it away!

If you have a suspicion that your computer is riddled with adware, feel free to check out our adware cleaner reviews. 

We believe malware detection scores from independent test institutes such as; av-test, virus bulletin, and av-comparatives are important when selecting your virus protection. We have collated some scores for you, however we don't display by test scores alone, many factors are used.

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So you can choose your perfect antivirus use our filters to choose the features you require. As default we list antivirus providers by top affiliated. You can change how we sort this list using the sort by filer and select; Most Popular, Top Featured or Lowest Price. Most popular uses total number of unique clicks sent to each antivirus over the last 7 days. Top Featured positions are chosen by the webmaster, we receive advertising revenue from some antivirus providers and this impacts the order which the webmaster chooses. Lowest price lets you list by lowest price first. We do not include every plan from each antivirus we use the price for the plan which we link to and this may not be the lowest price available.