Remove PlayVideoCenter Pop-up Ads — How to Fix Gude

PlayVideoCenter pop-up notifications appear out of the blue, detracting and irritating you. Still, that is much more than annoying pop-ups – their nature is clearly malicious, and they can introduce other malware to your system. In this article, I will show you the guide how to remove PlayVideoCenter pop-up advertisements and explain how to avoid them in the future.

What are PlayVideoCenter pop-up advertisements?

As the pop-up definition goes, these are short and small advertisements that attract your attention to a product they promote. But the difference between regular pop-up ads and PlayVideoCenter notifications is the malicious origins of the latter. Common pop-ups are offered for you to enable on different sites with a understandable purpose – notify you about the new posts, discounts and so on. It is a useful thing to help your site to keep visitors and help the interested ones to have the best price.

Short summary of the Playvideocenter.com pop-up ads:

PlayVideoCenter pop-up notifications, in contrast, have a deal with unlegit websites. You will generally witness the proposition to turn them on after a redirection from another page. It’s OK to see redirects unless they throw you into such a dubious place. In this case, turning on pop-ups is offered as the anti-DDoS check. Alternatively, the web pages can deny showing you the contents unless you turn on these push notifications. These demands should already raise suspicion, as websites generally have a more convenient anti-bot mechanism. Witnessing this requirement should be the reason to skip the website right away. In some cases, even when you click “Allow”, you will not get to the site – the only page it has is a landing page with the offer to turn on the pop-ups.

How does this work?

The majority of web browsers support enabling pop-ups from websites. Websites, on the other hand, can send notifications with the content they want. It may be a promotion of the product posted on this site, or an ad of the page of their partner. As a result, you can see the push notification from site X, but opening it will throw you to website Y – because a link to that website was added.

The banners these criminals show are paid under the pay-per-view model. It generally provides a miserable commission for one viewer, but when you can send ads to hundreds of users and make it hundreds of times every day – that is a way bigger sum. Even though most of such ads giving no result at all, it can still bring all the parties a lot of money.

Are PlayVideoCenter pop-up advertisements dangerous?

Yes, they are. Initially, they can look harmless – just a blinking window that appears from time to time. However, the contents of this window differ drastically from what you used to see in pop-up ads. Playvideocenter.com web page is ruled by crooks, who deliberately throw hundreds of irrelevant ads in pop-ups. They also don’t follow any manners of advertising and can make sporadic pop-up advertisements into a hurricane of ads. For weak systems, that may be enough to make the system slower. But troubles are not over at this point.

As any other thing that touches illegal ads, PlayVideoCenter pop-up notifications don’t have legit deals to offer. Even though crooks make the banners similar to ones from Amazon, Walmart or Ebay, the site these ads will throw you to are completely different. And these pages may offer you to turn on other pop-ups, install a “useful” program, or pay for a thing at a big discount and never receive it. Let’s leave aside the cases when pop-ups promote phishing pages or straightforward malware. There’s no way these pages will bring you any good, thus interacting with them is a very bad idea. For the same reason, PlayVideoCenter push notifications are not recommended to click on either, and the best solution is to disable them as soon as possible.

How to remove PlayVideoCenter pop-ups?

First and foremost, you should reset your browser settings. It is possible to accomplish in manual or automated way. The former, obviously, takes more time to complete and can be somewhat complicated if you have never done that. Automated supposes the use of anti-malware programs that can reset all browser settings at once.

Reset your browsers manually

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 browsers are reset, you need to ensure that your browser will connect the right DNS while connecting to the website you need. Create a text file titled “hosts” on your pc’s desktop, then open it and fill it with the following lines²:

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.

Scan your system for possible viruses

Once the scan is complete, you will see the detections or a notification about a clean system. Proceed with pressing the Clean Up button (or OK when nothing is detected).

1. Official Microsoft guide for hosts file reset.