Freeadvguide Ads Removal Guide — How to Fix It?

Written by Wilbur Woodham
Freeadvguide pop-up alerts can show up out of the blue, covering the material of the website you checked or opening your browser when you don’t desire it to be opened.

Clicking the Freeadvguide ad may result in the injection of different malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the guideline of Freeadvguide popups clearing in a couple of ways, as well as checking your personal computer for extra viruses existence.

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What are Freeadvguide pop-ups?

Freeadvguide popups are an effect of adware activity. Adware is a sort of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which produces a large volume of profit for adware suppliers. These advertisements may contain sometimes shocking content, or have a link to harmful content/website, considering that adware maintainers have no purpose to check the goodness of the web content they are going to show – their single target is cash.

Freeadvguide push notification

Freeadvguide push notification.

Pop-up marketing itself is a good, low-cost and very effective advertising instrument1. It permits the seller to link the customers’ attention to their site, and the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to buy. When the consumer will receive a pop-up notification that the TV set he desires to buy is provided at the online shop he/she saw earlier with a 15% discount, one will definitely use this opportunity and get it. Considering the incredibly small cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising instrument is a much-loved thing amongst the marketing teams of large internet retail stores.

However, such a rewarding plan could not be missed by virus creators. Ability to demonstrate the popup advertisements forcibly to the victims of malware invasion is a perfect basis for malicious adjustments with the popup ads. And Freeadvguide.com ads is just one of hundreds that are “employed” in this system.

Here is a short summary for the Freeadvguide site
Site Freeadvguide.com
Hosting AS14618 Amazon.com, Inc.
United States, Ashburn
Infection Type Adware, Push notifications, Unwanted Ads, Pop-up Ads
IP Address 18.213.228.110
Symptoms Annoying pop-up ads in the right corner.
Similar behavior Mostshopsale2, Gd, Promoendingb2
Fix Tool
To remove possible virus infections, try to scan your PC

How have I got the Freeadvguide virus?

There are a huge amount of methods of getting contaminated by the adware that result in the Freeadvguide popups tornado. A lion’s part of this computer virus incidents is after the freeware or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software can additionally be downloaded from the main web page, and the adware is provided as a legal bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of individuals regularly make use of the unreliable programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, various utilities that are free of cost, and even hacked programs. All of these sorts of applications are unsafe, due to the fact that it is extremely simple to build in a Freeadvguide malware under the cover of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Freeadvguide popup virus may likewise be concealed in the promotion somewhere on the odd web page. Such sites are in most cases full of bright and blinking ads, and their owners often approve any type of promotions to be placed on their web page. For this reason, clicking on such banners is a risky thing: only the advertisement contractor knows what will occur when you press this advertisement. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you may additionally get something far more unsafe, like ransomware or coin miner; the large share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious ads.

People dislike popups

The statistic shows that people dislike popup advertising more than other types of promotions

Potentially unwanted applications, like Freeadvguide popup virus can initiate a wide range of troubles on your PC. Distracting is not the single problem – pop-ups may present you the ads, where you are offered to get another unknown program, or “a amazing security tool”. Scareware is often spread under the last slogun. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, can have spyware functions. And it is quite hard to distinguish the unwanted app from a good one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and fake antiviruses, popup-related advertisements are also exploited as a distribution way by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such viruses is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And even if you are not clicking these promotions, they may be clicked by whoever who also uses your computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to solve it without information loss. It is recommended to eliminate the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

How can I get rid of Freeadvguide pop-up advertisements?

The tutorial of Freeadvguide adware elimination contains 2 parts. Initially, we need to eliminate the malware, and then correct the consequences of its action. The removal task is quite simple, since it can be done even with making use of Microsoft Defender – anti-virus software that is available on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. However, because of its significant resources utilization, as well as some failures that may be pivotal for some groups of individuals, Defender is frequently turned off by the users, so its use is likely impossible. Additionally, various trojan viruses have the ability to shut off the embedded antivirus. It is far better to make use of the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I’d recommend you to use Gridinsoft Anti-Malware2 – a well-proven anti-malware tool that will surely wipe out the viruses from your computer and make an invulnerable shield with a Proactive protection function. But let’s take care of Freeadvguide adware first.

Removing Freeadvguide popup virus with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

  • Download and install GridinSoft Anti-Malware. After the installation, you will be offered to perform the Standard Scan. Approve this action.
  • Gridinsoft Anti-Malware during the scan process

  • Standard scan checks the logical disk where the system files are stored, together with the files of programs you have already installed. The scan lasts up to 6 minutes.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware scan results

  • When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Freeadvguide malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.
  • GridinSoft Anti-Malware - After Cleaning

Now, when the computer is clean of viruses, we can proceed to the browser reset. You can do this step manually, as well as with the use of GridinSoft Anti-Malware.

Reset browser settings to default

Manual method of browser reset

To reset Edge, do the following steps :
  1. Open “Settings and more” tab in upper right corner, then find here “Settings” button. In the appeared menu, choose “Reset settings” option :
  2. Reseting the Edge browser

  3. After picking the Reset Settings option, you will see the following menu, stating about the settings which will be reverted to original :
For Mozilla Firefox, do the next actions :
  1. Open Menu tab (three strips in upper right corner) and click the “Help” button. In the appeared menu choose “troubleshooting information” :
  2. The first step to revert Mozilla Firefox

  3. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option :
  4. The second step of Firefox restoration
    After choosing this option, you will see the next message :
    The last step for Firefox
If you use Google Chrome
  1. Open Settings tab, find the “Advanced” button. In the extended tab choose the “Reset and clean up” button :
  2. In the appeared list, click on the “Restore settings to their original defaults” :
  3. Finally, you will see the window, where you can see all the settings which will be reset to default :
Opera can be reset in the next way
  1. Open Settings menu by pressing the gear icon in the toolbar (left side of the browser window), then click “Advanced” option, and choose “Browser” button in the drop-down list. Scroll down, to the bottom of the settings menu. Find there “Restore settings to their original defaults” option :

  2. After clicking the “Restore settings…” button, you will see the window, where all settings, which will be reset, are shown :

When the web browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your browser will definitely connect the right DNS while connecting to the website you need. Make a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following content3:

# Copyright (c) 1993-2006 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a ‘#’ symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host
# localhost name resolution is handle within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost

Find the hosts.txt file in C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc directory. Rename this file to “hosts.old.txt” (to distinguish it from the new one), and then move the file you created on the desktop to this folder. Remove the hosts.old from this folder. Now you have your hosts file as good as new.

Nevertheless, there is one issue that makes the things much harder to fix, especially without the anti-malware program. A lot of adware variants that are used to show you the Freeadvguide pop-up promotions are modifying the deep browser configurations, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you try to change your browser settings after your machine was penetrated by pop-up-related malware, your browser will crash quickly. In some cases, you will see no crash, but huge lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop reacting for ~ 30 secs, and then it will be back to the normal, till you try to open settings one more time.

Reset your browser settings with GridinSoft Anti-Malware

To reset your browser with GridinSoft Anti-Malware, open the Tools tab, and click the “Reset browser settings” button.

Tools tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

You can see the list of the options for each browser. By default, they are set up in the manner which fits the majority of users. Press the “Reset” button (lower right corner). In a minute your browser will be as good as new.

Reset Browser Settings tab in GridinSoft Anti-Malware

The browser reset is recommended to perform through the antivirus tool by GridinSoft, because last is also able to reset the HOSTS file without any additional commands.

How to Remove Freeadvguide Pop-ups?

Name: Freeadvguide

Description: Freeadvguide - a lot of users became a target for the pop-up advertisements. I have a lot of friends who literally bombed me with the questions like “how to remove Freeadvguide.com push notifications?” or “why do Freeadvguide.com pop-ups keep appearing on Chrome even after AdBlock installation?”. In this article we will show you how to deal with Freeadvguide pop-ups, which may corrupt your browser’s correct performance, and create a lot of troubles while you are working.

Operating System: Windows

Application Category: Adware

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References

  1. More about pop-up ads on Wikipedia.
  2. GridinSoft Anti-Malware review and the reasons why I recommend it for malware removal.
  3. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.

About the author

Wilbur Woodham

I was a technical writer from early in my career, and consider IT Security one of my foundational skills. I’m sharing my experience here, and I hope you find it useful.

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