Turning the Sound off in Ad-Aware 1.05

Spybot Search and Destroy was my mainstay in keeping my Windows system free of spyware until recently, when Lavasoft released a new version of Ad-Aware. Ad-Aware had been my favorite but wasn't updated for a long while.

The software is thorough and currently has frequent updates. There's only one problem. When it finds a piece of spyware, it uses this godawful alert sound that made me jump the first time I heard it. Just today, I left Ad-Aware running in the other room, and went to the next room to greet my wife Karen just home from work, and she jumped about three feet sideways when that "BLAT" noise came barreling out of my subwoofer. Making me especially mad is that I thought I had already turned it off.

Lavasoft has succumbed to the dreaded WinAmp disease: let's make the interface skinnable, cool and mysterious. So it took me a while to figure out that the icon with the gear on it is for settings. Once there, I scanned the list of buttons on the settings window, and decided that "Interface" is how I would turn the sound file off.

So I blanked out the file name for "Play This Wave file if Targets Are Found" field in question, and saved the change, figuring it would stop playing it. No luck. Finally, under the "Tweak" option, under a sub-category called "Misc Settings", I found the option that turns the sound off. (To be honest, I had already deleted the sound file, but now I was mad.)

Why not make blanking the file work, or at least indicate it didn't, rather than silently (or noisily!) failing? Better yet, why even make noise at the user in the first place? If it were any other program, behavior that anti-social would be cause for immediate removal.

All said, I have to recommend you look past the interface and download Ad-Aware. It found things Spybot missed, and cleans out your system restore files. I've already had to use a system restore that had spyware in it, so I appreciate the thoroughness.

But don't forgot to turn that infernal sound off. To summarize, from the main window, click on the button with a gear on it, click on "Tweak", then hit the plus sign on "Misc Settings" to show both options. Next, click on the green check mark next to "Play sound at scan completion if scan locates critical objects" to change it to a red X mark, and click "Proceed" to actually save your changes and turn the sound off, and then scan in peace.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Friday, December 17, 2004 (Link)

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