from Ad-Aware - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ad-Aware is an anti-spyware program developed by Lavasoft that detects and removes spyware or adware on a user's computer. It also detects dialers, Trojans, malware, viruses, bots, rootkits,data-mining, aggressive advertising, parasites, browser hijackers and tracking components.

Lavasoft offers a free, downloadable version called Ad-Aware 2008 Free, and three paid-for products called Ad-Aware 2008 Plus, Ad-Aware 2008 Pro and Ad-Aware Enterprise 2.0. With the 2008 release, the Plus and Pro products include integrated anti-virus protection.
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In February 2008, Grisoft was officially renamed as AVG Technologies. Makers of AVG Security software.

Both programs are virtually the same now but originally were quite different as Ad-aware was anti malware/spyware application that developed into the Anti Virus field.....while AVG was an anti virus application that developed into an all in-one ant-virus/malware/spyware program.

Both are excellent programs with good reputations but AVG kind of got the upper hand in 2006 as it was developed into part of the Windows Vista security package and is available for download through windows update.