Completely Remove Ad-Aware Antivirus on PC – Uninstall Tutorials

Learn how to remove Ad-Aware Antivirus in Windows through effective operations.

You may tell from the name that Ad-Aware Antivirus is a security product providing protective features against virus, adware, spyware, malware, etc. The problem is that it also shares the same issue that most other antivirus products have – hard to uninstall. If that’s the problem you’re having, learn how to effectively remove Ad-Aware Antivirus by reading this article.

The possible reasons of uninstall failures:

• You didn’t shut down the program and its processes before removal.
• You forgot to clean out its registry entries.
• You canceled the removal process or restart your PC in the middle, so the uninstall was interrupted and went wrong.
• One or more files got missing or corrupted, so the uninstall wizard failed to be activated. If that’s the reason, you shall try to reinstall Ad-Aware Antivirus.

Now let’s pick up what you might leave behind and move on to correctly remove Ad-Aware Antivirus.

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Manually Remove Ad-Aware Antivirus in Windows

1. To smoothly perform the removal process, log in the system as an Administrator, so that you won’t be asked for password permission all the way. In most cases we log in Windows as an Administrator at home as the default settings.

2. Right-click on the Ad-Aware Antivirus icon on the System Tray, and select Stop Ad-Aware Antivirus to close the program.

3. Press and hold Ctrl + Alt + Del to run Task Manager, terminate Ad-Aware Tray by selecting it in the Processes tab and tapping End Task.

4. Press and hold Windows key + C to open the Charms bar, and click Search.

5. Type “Ad-Aware”, right-click Ad-Aware Antivirus in the results and select Uninstall.

6. In the list of installed programs, find & double-click it to activate its default uninstall wizard.

7. On Ad-Aware Antivirus Updater window, click Remove.

8. You are given two options which are “Turn on Windows Defender” and “Turn on Windows Firewall.” Keep them ticked as recommended, and hit Next.

9. Confirm the removal by clicking Yes.

10. You can choose to Reboot Now or Reboot Later.

11. Press and hold Windows key + C to open the Charms bar again, click Search, and enter “regedit” to open the Registry Editor.

12. Then on the navigator click Edit > Find…, type “Ad-Aware” in the box to find the related entries/keys (if they exist), then delete them to completely remove Ad-Aware Antivirus.

13. Reboot your computer if you haven’t done it in Step 10.

14. (Optional) Now you can choose to uninstall Web Companion, which might have been installed as a bundled product.

Easily Remove Ad-Aware Antivirus with Max Uninstaller

Compared to the manual way, this would be much easier to understand and perform. Anytime you wish to uninstall a program, just launch Max Uninstaller from your desktop or the Start menu instead of thinking where to start the removal. But knowing the regular uninstall steps, you might as well try to remove Ad-Adware Antivirus this way:

1. Shut down everything related to Adware Antivirus, install and launch Max Uninstaller, select it as your target, and hit Run Analysis > Then you see the list of related files with details including their names, locations and sizes.

2. Confirm the uninstall by clicking Complete Uninstall, then hit Scan Leftovers to proceed > A list of registry entries (remaining files) will be presented also with details including their names, locations and sizes.

3. Click Delete Leftovers to completely remove Ad-Aware Antivirus.

After seeing the “Congratulations! The program has been successfully removed…”, you can click “Back to Step1” to refresh programs list, then check whether your target has gone.

A Little More to Know

I shall remind that during the installation of Ad-Aware Antivirus, the Web Companion program may also be installed as a bundled product, and your browser’s default homepage may be set as www.Bing.com. Therefore, if you don’t want that, remember to remove Web Companion and restore your homepage (in Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Internet Explorer.

The above two methods would help you effectively remove Ad-Aware Antivirus, as well as understand what you’re supposed to do when you need to uninstall an application. 🙂 So that the next time you bump into an annoying stubborn program, try what you learned to take it out, or simply hand over the job to Max Uninstaller – our recommended tool.

Please remember not to install another security software until the old one has been completely eliminated, otherwise conflicts may take over the system and you would have to spend much more time fixing that.