How to remove Hintonjour pop-ups? — Fix Guide

Hintonjour pop-up notices may show up unexpectedly, covering the post of the page you went to or opening your web browser when you do not need it to be opened.

Clicking on the Hintonjour advertisement may lead to the injection of different malware or unwanted programs. In this article, you will see the tutorial of Hintonjour popups removal in multiple ways, as well as inspecting your personal computer for extra malware existence.

It is better to prevent, than repair and repent!

Removing Hintonjour manually may take hours and may damage your PC in the process. I recommend you to download GridinSoft Anti-Malware for threats removal. Allows to complete scan and cure your PC during the trial period.

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What are Hintonjour pop-ups?

Hintonjour popups are an outcome of adware action. Adware is a type of malware that suggests you the pay-per-view of pay-per-click promotions, which creates a large amount of revenue for adware suppliers. These ads may contain explicit composition, or have a web link to malevolent content/website, since adware maintainers have no reason to check the goodness of the material they are going to reveal – their solitary target is cash.

Hintonjour push notification.

Pop-up advertising itself is an excellent, affordable and extremely efficient marketing instrument¹. It permits the vendor to attach the buyers’ attention to their website, as well as the customers to receive the dynamic updates on the goods they wish to buy. When the person will get a pop-up notification that the TV set he wishes to purchase is offered at the online shop he/she saw earlier with a 15% discount, one will surely use this possibility and purchase it. Considering the incredibly small cost for the popups and their targeting, such an advertising and marketing method is a much-loved thing among the marketing departments of huge online retail stores.

Nonetheless, such a rewarding scheme could not be missed by virus creators. Ability to demonstrate the popup advertisements by force to the targets of malware invasion is a great basis for evil-minded adjustments with the popup promotions. And Hintonjour.com promotions is one of hundreds that are “employed” in this scheme.

Here is a short summary for the Hintonjour site

How have I got the Hintonjour virus?

There are a plenty of methods of getting contaminated by the adware that result in the Hintonjour popups tornado. A lion’s part of this computer virus cases is after the free software or cracked programs, that are distributed on the peering networks. Free software may additionally be downloaded from the official web page, and the adware is presented as a legit bundled program.

There is no need to blame yourself. A lot of users oftentimes work with the dubious programs from untrusted providers: abandonware, different utilities that are free of cost, or even hacked programs. All of these types of software are unsafe, since it is extremely easy to integrate a Hintonjour malware under the guise of part of the license hacking script, or as a component of the self-made algoritm inside of the Windows optimization tool.

Hintonjour popup malware can likewise be concealed in the promotion somewhere on the unusual web page. Such websites are usually filled with colorful and blinking ads, and their proprietors often accept any promos to be published on their web page. Therefore, clicking such banners is a risky thing: only the ad provider knows what will occur when you click this ad. Besides some “light” viruses, like adware or undesirable programs, you can additionally get something far more risky, like ransomware or coin miner; the big share of coin miners distribution is exactly after the malicious ads.

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

Potentially undesirable applications, like Hintonjour pop-up virus can cause a lot of different troubles on your computer. Distracting is not the only problem – pop-up notifications can show you the ads, where you are offered to download another dubious program, or “a perfect security tool”. Scareware is usually spread with the last motto. Potentially unwanted applications, in turn, may have spyware functions. And it is pretty hard to distinguish the undesirable app from a legit one, if you don’t know the exact names. Besides the PUPs and pseudo antiviruses, popup-related ads are also exploited as a spreading way by different trojan viruses, for instance – coin miners. The consequences of activity of such malware is 100% unwanted, and can cost you hundreds of dollars. And even if you are not interacting with these advertisements, they can be clicked by someone who also makes use of your personal computer – parents, children, spouse, etc. So the situation can become much more serious, and it will be much harder to deal with it without information loss. It is recommended to get rid of the viruses with antivirus programs as soon as possible.

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

The manual of Hintonjour adware clearing consists of 2 parts. First, we need to get rid of the malware, and after that fix the results of its activity. The elimination process is very simple, since it may be performed even with using Microsoft Defender – security program that is available on all personal computers with Windows 8/10. However, because of its large resources consumption, as well as some problems that can be serious for some groups of users, Defender is frequently disabled by the users, so its use is likely impossible. What’s more, different trojan viruses are capable to switch off the embedded antivirus. It is much better to use the separated program that will not have such weakness.

I’d advise you to utilize Gridinsoft Anti-Malware² – a well-proven antivirus device that will surely erase the malware from your PC and also make an invulnerable shield with a Proactive protection function. However, let’s handle Hintonjour adware first.

Removing Hintonjour 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.

• 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.

• When the scan is over, you may choose the action for each detected virus. For all files of Hintonjour malware the default option is “Delete”. Press “Apply” to finish the malware removal.

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. 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. In the next screen, find the “Refresh Firefox” option :

After choosing this option, you will see the next message :

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 make sure that your web browser will definitely connect the proper DNS while connecting to the site you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your desktop, after that open it and fill it with the following text³:

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.

However, there is one issue that makes the things a lot harder to restore, specifically without the anti-malware program. A lot of adware variants that are utilized to show you the Hintonjour pop-up advertisements are modifying the deep browser settings, disabling an access to the settings tab. So, if you attempt to fix your browser settings after your PC was infected by pop-up-related malware, your browser will certainly crash soon. In some cases, you will see no crash, however, significant lag spike after pressing the “settings” key. Browser will stop responding for ~ 30 secs, and then it will be back to the typical, until you attempt 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.

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.

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.

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