A-squared Malware Remove

By Author: Aaron Webber
Total Articles: 26
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A² is available in two versions: a2 Free and a2 Personal. The $29.95 personal version is identical to the free version but includes a background monitor, a number of analytic tools plus automatic signature file updates. A-Squared Free seems to have worked out many of its major quirks, and has become a top-notch free malware remover.

When the program starts, it opens to the Security Status page. From there, you can run scans, update the program, access the A² knowledge base and choose from among 20 display languages. Program options are arranged on the left nav: the aforementioned Security Status, Scan PC, Quarantine, and Configuration tabs. Scan PC contains four scanning options: Quick, Smart, Deep, and Custom. Obviously, Quick Scan is the fastest and most superficial, while the Deep Scan can take several hours.

If you choose a scan that examines your cookies, the app will recommend closing your Web browser. Custom lets you choose not only which folders to scan, but also lets you opt out of heuristic, tracking cookie, and spyware remnant scans. There is also a Whitelist where you can add folders or files, ...
... accessible at the bottom of the main Scan tab panel. The Quarantine tab uses a spreadsheet-style layout to manage isolated files, and the Configuration tab has options for Context menu scans, Update behavior, and Permissions settings.

There's an annoying design quirk, where important options like the Whitelist are placed in the bottom left of the active panel. But for an antimalware program that's free and doesn't install its own spyware on your machine, A-Squared 3 is the place to be.

A2 was the second fastest scanner we tested. It was only bettered by PestPatrol, a product that may be quick but not noted for the thoroughness of its scans. A2 was in fact nearly twice as fast as TDS-3 and The Cleaner, a creditable performance given the size of its signature database.

A2 may scan quickly but its trojan detection performance was more modest. It detected 6 out of the 16 test trojans, a performance that places it in the middle of the products tested in this series of reviews. You could argue that this modest performance could be explained by the fact that the product does not scan within archives and several of the test trojans were contained within archives. We don't agree; the monitor would had a chance to detect the trojans when executed and it didn't. In fact the monitor only detected one trojan that was not detected by the file scanner.

The monitor occupies 4960KB of memory and ran inconspicuously in the background. It eats up quite a few CPU cycles when first loaded presumably as it checks running processes but as you can see from the following graph of system CPU and memory usage that a2 (green trace) consumed few resources indeed. In fact it only seems to consume resources when a new program is loaded (the hump in the blue graph) suggesting limited real time memory monitoring is taking place. On a 3.2GHz P4 we could just notice a slight sluggishness when loading programs whole the a2 monitor was loaded. At other times we could detect no effect on performance at all. Read more Free Anti virus Review