Custom Scan Settings

After clicking “Configure,” choose from the following customized scan settings. See a description of each section you can choose to scan below.

Sections to Scan

Active processes: Scans all active processes currently running on your system.

Registry: Scans known spyware areas of the registry for the current user.

Registry executables: Scans within the registry for malicious executables.

Hosts file: Scans your Hosts file. Edits to the Hosts file may occur due to home page hijackers. If you use a Hosts file editor to block content, this option can cause some entries to be detected and presented for removal. To avoid any unwanted changes to your Hosts file, please review the content at the end of a scan and select the entries that you want to ignore in subsequent scans.

Tracking cookies: Scans for tracking cookies in Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera.

Alternate Data Stream (ADS): Scans files and simultaneously investigates ADS streams for malicious objects.

Executable files only: Scans only for executable files. This option should be used by advanced users because this will eliminate detection of related content that could cause the removed executables to be reinstalled at a later time.

Archives: Scans within archives such as .zip, .cab, etc.

Spanned files: Scans CAB files which are spanned. Spanned CABs occur where several CAB files make up a single CAB archive.

Possible browser hijacks: Scans browser settings (like start page and search page), favorites, and desktop for malicious URLs.

LSPs: Detects and unloads malicious LSP (Layered Service Providers). LSP are used by malicious software to detect network activity. The LSPs must be loaded for Ad-Aware to detect them.